On Turning 73 in 2019: The Future of No Future

I had a lot to say about how the the future looks at 73 in that particular year of 2019, in two long posts.  This one is about "the future" as a concept, which usually refers to the far future, and in some sense the ultimate future.  In late November 2024, these thoughts take on new relevance, probably for others as well as me.

As I approach another birthday, I mark also the fleeting paradox of living into one's seventies.  While each year seems to speed by faster than you can blink your eyes and see it, each year nevertheless has a greater, more consequential weight;  it takes us inexorably nearer the physical conditions that forecast the end.   So each year means more, and yet is harder to grasp.

Seventy-three--my upcoming milestone--is not 79, and in particular not what 79 often was in the 1940s.  Yet my response to external events of this time raises a question defined by the last book of H.G. Wells when he was that age at that time, and more contemporary criticisms of it.

Mind at the End of Its Tether is Well's shortest book by far, published the year of his death (August 1946) and of my birth (June 1946.)  In The Outsider, Colin Wilson calls it "the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature, together with T.S. Eliot's 'Hollow Men.'"  Wells' forecasts the inevitable end of human civilization, perhaps of the human species, and perhaps of all life on Earth.

I find this particular Wells essay almost incomprehensible, but parts of it suggest forecasts he had made earlier with more evidence.  But first, I want to focus on a particular response to it.

It is present in science fiction author Rudy Rucker's foreword to the Provenance Edition of Wells' last books.  "When approaching their own deaths, some people fall into what I might call fatalistic synecdoche.  They conflate the whole (the world) with the part (themselves), and announce that the world is about to end."

Another science fiction author--Bruce Sterling--was even harder on Wells in his posts to the 2016 annual State of the World thread on the venerable San Francisco site, the Well.  "In this book, the great speculator is elderly, exhausted, politically disillusioned, fatally ill and also the Atomic Bomb has been detonated," Sterling typed.  "So he's like: Welp!  That's It!  No More Future!  For him, yes, that's true.  Personally, he's toast; no more HG Wells."  (And like us old folks are wont to do, I'm somewhat repeating myself.)

I don't defend that strange little book, but I do think all of this belittles Wells.  I spent the better part of a decade reading him and about him, and a recent return to commentaries on him hasn't changed my mind: Wells has to be one of the most misunderstood writers in modern history--with the precise misunderstandings saying a lot more about that writer or speaker than about Wells.

Nevertheless I take this seriously as a caution.  Because in this past year I myself have given up any faith that human civilization has much of a future, with the future of the species and life on Earth as we know it also in considerable peril.

For the moment at least, I try to separate my perceptions that might well be influenced by, if not age itself, simply having lived so long.  The repetition of the same idiocies gets very tiresome, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to believe that this complex of self-destructive behavior will change, before the collapse of civilization forces such changes.  And even then...

I start to resent my time being taken up by such idiocies, especially since there is rarely anything new about them, except some superficial novelty.  But at least at the moment I can still discriminate between my own reactions, and the evidence before me.

So taken together--a natural withdrawal to potentially more meaningful engagement (or at least less stressful and unpleasant), plus the informed sense that the course of the next couple of centuries and perhaps eons is set--I have ceased for one thing to read or write about what used to be called "current events."

Such political, cultural and social events and trends have consequences, and I keep enough of an eye on them to be warned of personal impact.  I still read the list of daily headlines that the Washington Post emails me, and when I think of it I look at Wikipedia's news of the day (which is usually very different.)  But that's about it. I no longer feel it is useful let alone important to follow and analyze these phenomena, partly because they don't matter much in terms of the likely outcome, and particularly since it is highly doubtful I can influence them (or the response to them) in any way.  Otherwise, I've done my bit.  I'm done.

The baseline of the future is set by the climate crisis, which is now having its first effects.  What has been done to address it is very likely insufficient, and there are any number of reasons for believing that nothing really consequential will be done in time to prevent the conditions that will likely lead to the collapse of human civilization, the end of the current line of "progress," and quite likely the end of life as we know it on Earth.

I note that the public voices who've been warning of these possibilities still dance around this inevitability.  Bill McKibben is saying that civilization has a decade to make the necessary changes. He and others have been saying that for 30 years. The differences are that the necessary changes get more drastic and comprehensive every year, and they will not determine the near future--they may at best save the far future.

  Are "enormous changes at the last minute" (the title of a book of stories by the wonderful Grace Paley) even possible?  Perhaps. But the "last minute" is now, or very soon.  Time grows ever shorter, if indeed there is time.  Meanwhile, the Earth's atmosphere gets hotter and the planet's climate changes, in ways that will essentially never change back.

Climate crisis is the baseline planetary physical condition that attacks the ability of the planet to nourish and sustain human and other life.  It accelerates the destruction of the web of life that has been ongoing for centuries, reflected now in the ongoing mass extinction.  Although books like The Sixth Extinction chronicle how much worse it has already gotten, and how extensive it is likely to be, it's worth noting that it's been going on a long time.  In his 1939 book The Fate of Man, H.G. Wells noted:

"The list of species extinguished in the past hundred years is a long one; the list of species threatened with extinction today is still longer. No new species arise to replace those exterminated. It is a swift, distressful impoverishment of life that is now going on. And this time the biologist notes a swifter and stranger agent of change than any phase of the fossil past can show—man, who will leave nothing undisturbed from the ocean bottom to the stratosphere, and who bids fair to extinguish himself in the process.”

Human civilization expanded across the planet at the expense of the very environment that ultimately sustains human life.  Over recent centuries, the wholesale destruction of forests, across Asia, the Middle East and Europe and still ongoing in the Americas, may itself doom the species doing the destroying.  It has doomed plenty of other species already.

Why can't civilization change to fully address this crisis?  After all, previous challenges were met--from the threat of tyranny in World War II to the self-inflicted apocalypse in the making of nuclear weapons.  One reason is leadership. At this crucial moment, there is none, and I see none on the horizon.

In the past few years I've been trying to wrap my head around the immensity of World War II, which ended just before I was born.  What seems clear is that those 20th century existential crises of the Great Depression and World War II were met only by the extraordinary leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and (in the case of World War II) Winston Churchill, plus the contributions of lesser known but still essential and able men and women.  Still, World War II was enormously destructive, and the stories of its homicidal stupidities as well as its unknown and even accidental heroisms continue to emerge.

The fact that civilization has not yet been devastated by thermonuclear war is due almost entirely to the decisions of probably a handful of leaders.  When two superpowers were heavily armed with thermonuclear missiles and bombers on hair-trigger alert, only the decisions of fortuitously placed leaders as well as anonymous individuals at decision points,  prevented the full use of these weapons, on several occasions we know about.

 Sometimes it was a minor military leader who insisted on waiting for further evidence before launching a strike due to false information. But in better known instances, it was national leaders--in particular, Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy in the United States, who both held off advisers and political pressures to avoid thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  They later signed the groundbreaking first Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

It could have been otherwise.   In the 1968 presidential campaign, interviewer David Frost asked Senator Robert Kennedy what he thought was his greatest achievement so far.  Kennedy hesitated a moment, and then answered: "I think the role in the Cuban Missile Crisis...The only reason I hesitated at all is because I felt strongly about the election of 1960 and having a role in that change, because I think that affected the course of action and the course of history..."

1960 was the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  RFK returned to the point about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He noted there were 14 people involved in making the decisions for how the US would respond.  "...if six of them had been President of the United States, I think that the world might have blown up."  He added that "if Mr. Khrushchev had been a different man at that time, the world also would have blown up..."

Right now, at what is likely the most crucial time in human history, we do not have in place anything like the leadership required. We do not have institutions--nor the people that lead them-- with the necessary degree of integrity or intelligence.  In fact, this country and many other nations have been going in the opposite direction, into territory so dangerous, so corrupt and so absurd as to beggar belief.  I don't think I need to say any more than that.

Even if such leadership were forthcoming, it is necessary but not sufficient to meet the crisis of this time.  It requires a society able and willing to follow.

Addressing the Depression and organizing forces for World War II required all of FDR's creativity, determination, political acumen and judgment.  Those who lived through World War II as adults are mostly dead now, so we have only books and other records to suggest the enormity of that undertaking.  Experts today say that addressing the climate crisis would take at least that scale of effort, and that level of concentration, not only by leadership and government, but by society as a whole.  That concentration and commitment was far from complete, but it was considerable--greater I suspect than generations alive today can imagine.

Yet leadership is ineffective unless followers agree with the goal and are willing to be led, even if it is for their own selfish reasons--particularly the more powerful agents of society.  War disrupts the conduct of business, but it also makes some interests rich, so big business largely fell in line.  World War II scaled up and created entire industries.  But most importantly, war (or Cold War) did not challenge the basis or conduct of corporate capitalism.

Addressing the climate crisis threatens large economic interests.  There's plenty of evidence that systematic climate crisis denial has been funded by fossil fuel corporations and those it has made wealthy. But more importantly, the changes necessary to save the planet fundamentally challenge the premises and conduct of capitalism, which today is virtually the only form of economic power in existence.

a former rainforest

Capitalism has always depended on these two elements: ignoring the future costs of destroying the ability of the natural environment to sustain life, and instituting some form of human slavery, which today is hidden in faraway sweatshops and countryside.

Exploitation in both of these senses continues on a massive scale, and it is that scale that has caused the climate crisis.  Resistance to ending that exploitation has been and remains overpowering.  The result is a divided and seemingly helpless society, its human weaknesses exploited to benefit current capitalist institutions.

Capitalism of this era, increasingly unfettered by legal or moral responsibilities towards society and the planet, has fed riches to the rich and deprived most others, resulting in deep divisions within society.  The political and communication tools of the entrenched rich have created, manipulated and exploited divisions, encouraging suspicions and rivalries.  Depriving people of economic security--and what's called income inequality is extreme right now--also tends to make them fearful and easier to exploit.

  Dividing elements of the exploited non-rich (on the basis of race, ethnicity,  gender, immigrant status, "intellectual elite" etc.) for their political benefit is one of the oldest and most successful strategies of these self-centered interests.  Popular failure to understand global heating, and to demand action to address it, has been one of their most conspicuous successes.  For these and other reasons, I believe that Kim Stanley Robinson is right: that effectively addressing the climate crisis is not possible in a world dominated by irresponsible capitalism.  No one seems to know who actually first pointed out that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." However, we do know it was Ursula Le Guin who said (at the National Book Awards) “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  Capitalism will end--I just don't think it will end soon enough.

There is another factor, perhaps even more profound. As big as World War II was and as much as was required, the nature of the task was thoroughly familiar: to fight and win a war.  Everybody understands that.  That's why every time a sustained effort is proposed, it's called a war on something.

(It is true however that, contrary to retroactive propaganda, many Americans weren't really sure why the country should go to war, particularly against Germany, other than because of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That's why the US government commissioned the "Why We Fight" film series.  Further, there was a great deal of grumbling and obstructionism from big business and its political minions. Still, the general goal of winning the war was understood.)

The situation was a little more complicated in the Great Depression, but getting people back to work and the economy healthy again was an easily understood goal.  Plus the catastrophe was evident; it affected almost everyone's life in highly tangible and persistent ways.

The climate crisis is not so easily comprehended or accepted.  That's what makes it a particular challenge.  The basic goal is simple enough to understand: to save the planet.  To keep the climate from changing beyond what life as we know it can tolerate, the world needs to all but eliminate spewing any more C02 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  That alone won't fix it--the destruction of habitat for non-human life must also be addressed--but it would be a start.

But there are conceptual problems.  One is the need to avoid the two common reactions to a fearful crisis: panic, or refusing to face it because it is too big and too scary to contemplate.  That second tendency, the one that is currently being exploited, is called denial.  Those of us who lived through the Cold War have seen both of these tendencies in reactions to the enormity of nuclear weapons.  There was also a kind of conceptual or emotional standoff between these two reactions, leading to numbed acceptance, and functional denial.

There is a secondary cause of denial: the basic changes necessary to confront the crisis seem too painful.  Giving up oil, which seems to mean cars, and giving up beef, for instance, are simply too much to accept on the say-so of some scientists.

Besides being exploited by those who feel they can't make enough money in a world dedicated to addressing the climate crisis and other ecological threats, this perfectly understandable denial is exacerbated by the nature of the climate crisis: until recently, and in large measure still, it is a phenomenon of the future.  Why worry about it if it isn't here?  It may never happen.  Worry about it then.  But because of the physical nature of the climate crisis, action must be taken in the present.  The future will be too late.  (I've written about this aspect before, as have others. I won't repeat it here.)

There is also the unfortunate fact that, in a sense, the climate crisis will never obviously happen.  The weather will just keep getting sporadically worse until it is worse nearly everywhere all the time, deaths and disease and disasters, likely including violence and war, will increase until over time the world has changed considerably.  But with nothing obviously pointing back to a cause called the climate crisis.

It is the difficulty that human societies and individuals have in seeing the present patterns of the oncoming future--and then acting decisively and comprehensively to meet the onrushing challenges.  But it is the ability to do so that humankind now needs, and has needed for a century.

Through a writing life that extended from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1940s, HG Wells focused on precisely this problem.  He saw that modern weaponry and other changes made strong international institutions necessary to prevent ever more powerful nations from destroying each other, and civilization with it.  His detailed warnings became realities that confirmed his analyzes and mirrored his fictions in two world wars.

Wells urged policymakers and citizens to think about the future consequences of human actions and of scientific discoveries.  He wrote about history as seen through such patterns. Above all, he urged everyone to think about the consequences of present actions on the future, and about visions of better futures to guide the present.

But at the end of his life he lost faith in the ability of humanity to change its way of thinking fast enough, including this approach to the future.  He had seen that human societies and human thinking could continue to develop to meet future challenges.  But the race between  anticipation and catastrophe had been lost, he felt.  Civilization had become so large and complex and destructive, and was changing so extensively and rapidly, that it no longer made sense, it was out of control--out of anyone's control. It was bound to destroy itself. The human mind had developed as far as it would ever develop, it would go no farther--it was mind at the end of its tether.

Maybe today the race between anticipation and catastrophe is more like baseball, and we can avoid the third out and score enough runs in the ninth to win.  (But then there's that old bumper sticker: Nature Bats Last.)  It seems more likely the game is football or basketball, and even if we are driving for the winning score, the game is over when the clock runs out and the fourth quarter ends, and we've lost.  

I don't think it's true that because I see the end of everything coming for myself, I see the end of everything for everyone.  But I was a great deal more anxious about all this thirty or twenty years ago when I was younger, and that's when it seemed possible that the world could grow up in time.  Now that it seems so unlikely that dire fate will be avoided, there's little choice but to accept it. (Bearing in mind the Scott Fitzgerald dictum: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.")  Being old probably makes that easier, especially since I likely won't live to see much of it.

But still, it's painful and--in the full sense--awful to contemplate: that this beautiful world will end, not just for me, but for all time.  This is perhaps a particular feature of my generation's old age, another of our firsts...though ours won't be the last to feel this.

I have however thought about the near future and the lives of those much younger than me--the coming decades and into the next century--and I see a world with positive possibilities, even without contemplating any difference in the ultimate outcome.  But I will save those somewhat happier thoughts for next time.

On Turning 73 in 2019: Living Hope

This is the second of two posts from June 2019, on the occasion of my 73rd birthday.  Both are about how the future looks at that time in the world, and from my age.  The first was on the far future.  This one is about the future that younger people now alive will live, and some unknown number of generations beyond that.   After the recent 2024 election, these thoughts assume new relevance.
There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."
Susan Sontag

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard

“It is important to work for future generations, for our descendants. We must be proud to do something, even though people do not usually know its value.”
Shunryu Suzuki
founder of San Francisco Zen Center

We live in many kinds of time. We experience time differently, especially according to our age,  and the contexts of our experience are shaped by cycles we know, and that we don't know.  So any speculation on the future is bound to be vague, provisional and a bit of hit and miss.  But this is what I feel about the relatively near future, beyond my time.

As outlined in my previous post, the context of coming decades is likely to be dominated by the effects of the climate crisis, named or not.  Those persistent effects and the new contexts they create will change what people do and how they live.

When that happens in a widespread way (for it is already happening in relatively ignored parts of the world) depends on the climate.  What happens, and how it happens, depends to a great extent on future generations--probably beginning with those who are now young, who are now children.

Right now the impetus for efforts to address the climate crisis--such as the proposed Green New Deal in the US--is coming largely from the young.  Their leading edge is represented in government, and presumably in other influential institutions.  If their awareness becomes the standard for future generations, then responses can become more conscious and deliberate.

 But one way or another, the climate crisis will change just about everything, perhaps in the next few decades, probably by mid century, almost certainly by the end of the century.

There are two major aspects to the climate crisis: there are the causes, and there are the effects.  Societies may choose whether or not to address the causes of future global heating, such as greenhouse gases.  There will be less choice in whether or not to deal with the effects: the sea level rise, heat waves, droughts, floods, shortages, disease outbreaks, and the likely secondary effects of relocations, mass migrations and armed conflicts will demand attention--first local, and then as resources stretch and more people are involved, beyond that. Yet how societies and especially individuals choose to deal with the effects will make all the difference in how people live their lives.

There are those who imagine possible futures, mostly as stories.  While these stories may be visions that include new technologies and/or old forms of human society, or they may be mostly "what if?" explorations, cautionary tales or metaphors of the present, they offer a range of possibilities that cannot be dismissed.  I offer here only a few elements of a future I can imagine and foresee.

There are aspects of that future that can begin right now.  The young can prepare for the meaningful work of that future.  Many of the concerns of today will evaporate.  The consumer economy cannot be the focus of so many lives.  The emphasis will be on meeting needs, rather than in inciting and manipulating wants.

There will be increasing interest in finding technical means for addressing both causes and effects of the climate crisis.  The young can prepare themselves to participate in such research and development.  If I were advising adolescents today, I would suggest examining areas of study and possible occupations by asking the question, what will a climate crisis society need?

At this point, a stubborn refusal to surrender to some sense of the inevitable is healthy for the young. But denial is not.  They can dedicate themselves to possible means of addressing the causes as well as effects of the climate crisis.  But developing means to address future effects is also worthy and important.  In this way--the only meaningful way--they enact hope.  Hope is no longer principally a feeling.  It is a commitment, a set of activities, a life.

In terms of anticipating and dealing with effects, my guess is that the future will need managers of teams and resources responding to individual problems, and to develop strategies to address problems before they occur.

The future will need a greater proportion of dedicated individuals with skills for actions that today are often grouped under the name of first responders.  The future will need engineers and others in specific areas not yet prioritized by society's reward system.  Biological sciences will assume a new importance, especially in areas of innovative applications in energy, in forestalling a major extinction event.  Migrations because of climate will require innovative solutions in a host of areas.  And the list goes on.

The future will also need dreamers and storytellers, visionaries and critical minds, but using means and applying themselves in incalculable ways.  More broadly, when many occupations that today seem important eventually fall away as useless and wasteful, the need for currently undervalued skills will come forward.

Other needs will become the focus of more jobs, and even with increasing difficulties, those jobs can be more meaningful to communities and the individuals who do them. The perils and pains of this future may be great.  But individuals may find new purpose. Life may be harder, but less absurd. What will unite all these occupations is clear purpose, beyond making money to pay for the illusions fed to everyone, or to sustain the unsustainable.

This future, when so much that seems unavoidably important today fades into the sodden inventory of this failing period of history,  offers new opportunities for individuals to make basic commitments.  Some of these will be instinctive, but many personal commitments and choices will need to be made consciously, because they will be hard to make.  It will even be hard to know they can and must be made.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
Howard Zinn

“Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There seem to me to be two essential mysteries about humanity and its history.  One is whether humanity as a whole would develop in time to meet challenges of the changing present, particularly those very large ones that humanity itself has set in motion.  So far, when applied to the climate crisis, the answer seems to be no.

The other in some ways underlies the first.  It is the nature of human nature.  Is human nature based on selfishness, greed, lust, fear, envy, anger, the will to dominate and the passion to destroy and to kill?  Or is it based on understanding, a moral sense and sense of justice, compassion, empathy, courage and generosity?  Or is it an uncertain mix of both?

That last view is expressed in a fable, attributed to several Native American peoples, and may be familiar to some from the under-rated film Tomorrowland.  A version of it goes like this:

A grandfather talks to his grandchild. "A fight is going on inside me," he said. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." 

"The other is good," he continued. "He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

 "The same fight is going on inside you," grandfather said, "and inside every other person, too."

The grandchild thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed." 

Under greater pressure and in starker terms than perhaps we can imagine, people of the near future will face this choice.  Their choice may not alter the ultimate future that comes after them--perhaps centuries later-- but it will help characterize their present.  Human civilization is some ways has been a struggle to inculcate a fair degree of personal freedom and justice for individuals while meeting the needs of community.  Freedom is based on choice, and community is based on a sense of common humanity, fairness, decency and shared fate.

 How the needs of the individual and society are both met is an ongoing test of humanity as a social species.  Individuals need the support of community, as community needs the commitment of individuals.  Apart from institutional constraints, the balance is achieved by a sense of responsibility, empathy, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The ethic of "you'd do the same for me" is perhaps the most basic human statement.

Even in his bleakest scenario for the future, HG Wells kept reminding readers than nothing will prevent at least individual human beings from exhibiting qualities of courage and love.  In adverse times, the need becomes even greater for "mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindness."

Redemption is a curious concept in this context, but there is something to it.  If humanity can't quite redeem its past by fixing its future, it can at least to some extent redeem itself.  Wells expressed his preference that, if the end is truly coming, he "would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack."

Humanity can go down fighting, and it can go down loving, both.  Perhaps it will even endure.  But its time of testing need not be one of unremitting pain and degradation. It can be a time that includes creativity, challenge, commitment and character, in which life is lived to the fullness of the moment.  For we live in many kinds of time.

On Turning 74 in Covid Year 2020

This birthday-related post from the summer of 2020 is almost entirely about that moment in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis--you know, the one so long ago we don't remember it.  I was going to skip reposting this one but I decided it's as important as any other of my birthday posts.  Instead of reflections on where my head and heart are as I pass another birthday in my 70s, this is about where I was in the world at that moment.

In summer 2020 we were halfway through the worst year of the pandemic, in which, by official count, more than 350,000 Americans died from Covid.  This is more Americans than were killed in the Civil War, which saw more Americans killed than in all other wars put together.  We have monuments, we have days of remembrance and ceremonies that honor the war dead, but we have little noted nor long remembered those that died that year, most of them senior citizens.

Covid has continued to kill.  As of this past spring, the number of confirmed and presumptive deaths from Covid in America total more than 1.1 million, more than any other country in the world. Again, most of those who died were elders, which by 2020 certainly included me.  

 There are designated days for remembering the dead at the time of year I post this now, so this is fitting remembrance.  And in particular, it is important to remember this as the person who was President, and presided over this crisis with incoherent and at most points insanely detrimental policies, inculcating lies that continue to take lives, is once again seeking that office.  

That was a year of uncertainty and turmoil, and thanks to what happened then, we got both an effective vaccine and a handle on effective means to prevent spread of the virus, as well as the unleashing of dark forces and a kind of uncaring that has diminished public life for older Americans ever since, including me.  I have resumed climbing Trinidad Head on my birthdays, as well as other times, and other outdoor activities.  I've resumed grocery shopping and other necessary errands indoors while masked.  But that's about all.

July 2020

Obviously a lot of events have been cancelled this year, and they continue to be.  But in this case the reason varies a little.

In recent years I've made a ritual hike up the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  The next one is next week, and I've been undecided about it.  We haven't been restricted here from driving and walking where we could safely distance from others.  That's even more true in recent weeks.

One of my favorite spots over the years, taken last June on a foggy birthday.

But the trail to the top of the Head is narrow for most of its length, with a few widely spaced turnouts, usually where there are benches facing the sea.  It would be impossible along most of it to pass someone going in the opposite direction with more than a foot or two between you, and sometimes less.

But with masks and the light risk of getting much virus passing someone for a moment in the open air, I was still considering it.  Even after my car battery died again.

Until Tuesday, when I read a story in the online Lost Coast Outpost, a report of a Zoomed meeting of county supervisors and the public health officer.  All the supervisors talked about questionable activities and noticing hostility about any covid crisis restrictions.  Then there was this:

Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone spoke urgently about an inundation of tourists in his district. “We’re being overrun in Trinidad, literally,” he said, “by hundreds and hundreds if not thousands” of people he described as “arrogant” and defiant, refusing to wear face coverings even when asked.

“So we’re gonna see a major outbreak out of Trinidad — that’s my prediction,” Madrone said. He asked the sheriff’s office to get involved. “Frankly, we need help in Trinidad right now. It is out of control, literally. … Please, give us some daily patrols that are highly visible.”

A couple of paragraphs down, the story read: "During the public comment period, several people expressed frustration, skepticism and outright defiance toward public health measures."

These included extreme and abusive comments towards public health officials, accusing them at one point of "borderline child abuse" because of restrictions on ball games.

It is true that Humboldt County has few covid cases (though there has been a small surge this week) but nobody seems to credit public health officials with contributing to the smallness of that number.  Nationally there is such disgraceful and violent behavior towards public health officials that dedicated and experienced leaders are quitting.

Apart from the self-defeating behavior that is more and more leading to a self-created epidemic, there is that arrogance of those who refuse to take precautions, endangering others as well as themselves and their families.  The fundamental respect for others that is signaled by wearing masks is disdained, and the social contract is visibly broken.

The social contract is more specifically broken with seniors.  The cant that seems to be more and more quoted is to the effect that people have a right to take the risk of getting infected, but that those who are especially vulnerable, especially old people, "should stay the hell home."  Presumably forever.

Even more than that, masks and common sense distancing have been demonically transformed into political/cultural statements.  If I wear a mask as I pass someone, do I want to invite hostility and arrogance on an isolated trail?  Believe me, there are times when the answer is yes.  But I'd rather not go there.  In any case, there might be more danger from attitude than infection.  Both are profoundly uncomfortable.

So I won't be going to Trinidad this birthday.  I won't even be driving up there anymore (assuming I get my car fixed) because I'm a bit leery of my own anti-social tendencies.  I'll be staying the hell home, which is not hell at all, as a matter of fact.

Meanwhile, the self-induced epidemic spreads, with record hospitalizations in seven states as well as surges of new infections in many others.  And infections (like climate crisis effects by the way) are a lagging indicator, meaning that the causes are in the past.  According to Johns Hopkins’s Erik Toner, “It’s basically the same reason for all these states: It was Memorial Day.” And we've had some three weeks of post-sequestration activities since then.  It's no wonder that Dr. Fauci said Tuesday that the next two weeks will be crucial in getting control of the epidemic.

But the federal government is not only ignoring the epidemic (reportedly considering withdrawing the state of emergency officially) but the Republican candidate who holds the title of President angrily denounces anyone who recognizes it.  There happens to still be a majority in the country who do recognize it, but those numbers are slipping.

And the rest of the world is noticing that it's out of control here, and the government seems to have stopped trying to do anything about it. Accordingly, as of Tuesday, the European Union was considering banning visitors from the US to protect their own citizens.  (Canada already does that, but quietly.) That's not exactly transitioning to greatness.  That's an historic humiliation.

But perhaps this is all because nobody is smart enough to understand the advanced thinking of the very stable genius in the White House.  Evidently, when he talks about the virus he is discussing it on the quantum level.  It's a demonstrated fact that indeed on the quantum level you might have to observe a particle in order for it to exist.  Therefore, if you don't want the virus to exist, you just don't look at it.

On Turning 75: From 2021

How It Happens

 The sky said I am watching

 to see what you

 can make out of nothing

 I was looking up and I said

 I thought you 

were supposed to be doing that

 the sky said Many

 are clinging to that 

I am giving you a chance

 I was looking up and I said

 I am the only chance I have 

then the sky did not answer

 and here we are 

with our names for the days

 the vast days that do not listen to us

— W. S. Merwin

 “In Blake, we recover our original state, not by returning to it, but by re-creating it. The act of creation is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess.” --Northrup Frye

Photo: Trinidad Head June 30, 2021

This is all I posted for my 75th birthday, curious choice for one of the Big Ones--three-quarters of a century.  On the day I was feeling somewhat wounded because no one but my partner contacted me.  I got cards and a call on subsequent days, but that day felt pretty empty.  Had my life come to nothing?  Nothing is the key word in both the Merwin poem and the Frye quote.  

On Turning 76: from 2022

 

I didn't post for my 76th birthday in 2022, so this is from the handwritten entries in a notebook. 

Turning 75 had something regal about it but 76 is just terrifying.  Several times I caught myself thinking "I'm 67, not so bad," then realizing it's 76.  76!  Maybe a Marx Brothers approach to soften it: 76! That's the spirit!  The spirit of 76!\

I climbed Trinidad Head.  Felt slower, but I felt better having done it.  It was sunny when I started.  At the top, on the bay side, I could see four layers of mountains, including the blue blur in the distance.  On the way down, at my power spot facing the ocean, I watched an enormous cloud bank at the horizon move towards me, white in front but gray behind.  Before I'd made it down, the sea was already gray against a darkening sky, with but a bright line at the horizon.  

Also on the way down I was passed by a fellow geezer walking up--he recognized my cap as a throwback Pittsburgh Pirates logo.  He thought 70s but it's really 60s.  

This past week I was going through mail from the earlly 1970s for a project and found old birthday cards.  So regardless of what comes in the mail tomorrow, I will have cards to look at from my mother, my grandmother and my sisters.  I feel sorry for people these days who don't get mail they can keep, or don't keep what they got.  Maybe you have to be 76 to feel that.

On Turning 77: Repost from 2023

 

My power spot on Trinidad Head which I climb every birthday.  BK photo.

Nothing that I do is finished

 so I keep returning to it

 lured by the notion that I long

 to see the whole of it at last

 completed and estranged from me

 but no the unfinished is what

 I return to as it leads me on

 I am made whole by what has just

 escaped me as it always does

 I am made of incompleteness

 the words are not there in words

 oh gossamer gossamer breath

 moment daylight life untouchable

 by no name with no beginning 

what do we think we recognize

 --W.S. Merwin

BK photo

 The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of CaptainFuture’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past. 

 In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College.  He signed it Captain Past.  It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.

 Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts.  I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily.  Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future.  But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016. 

 Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral.  I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant. 

 But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded.  And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than 15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”

 At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer.  When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years.  That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant.  Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.

 So I did a version of my Soul of the Future project as a series of posts here, but also the History of My Reading and more recently the TV and Me series, which concerned the past.  These evocations of the past increasingly took over this blog, partly because I was feeling more and more alienated from the public present. 

 For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it.  Just about everything is significantly different.  I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present.  Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived.  Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.

 Obviously, approaching my 77^th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me.  But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien.  Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here.  (For one thing, it had more birds.)

 Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence.  But for now, I live powerfully in memory.  Why do we have memories?  They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not.  Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival.  So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.

 What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore.  AI in particular has me throwing up my hands.  But in one essential way, the future is all too clear.  Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.

 I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room.  The climate crisis is the room. 

 The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future.  A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating.  But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come.  The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)

 Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain.  Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.    

 I repeat, the elephant has not left the room.  The elephant is the room.  The future world is a hotter world, with accelerating consequences.  Even this spring—April and May—there are or have been intense and long-lasting heat waves in southern Asia, Europe, North America, and always Africa.  There are massive forest fires already in western Canada and Siberia.  Torrential rains have flooded out towns in a region of Italy—the worst flooding in that country for a century.  A heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest—when a similar event happened in a summer month, it was called a once in a thousand years event.  That was two years ago.  Most ominously, the upper levels of the oceans are consistently hotter than they’ve been since measurements began 40 years ago, leading to an array of devastating current and future consequences.  The UN predicts the oceans will continue to heat up until at least 2300 just based on the effects of global heating to the present.

 These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial, and demand shocked attention.  Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees. 

 The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.

 To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences.  But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up.  Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.

Apart from the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear extinction in the mid-1960s, this country and the world in general seems less institutionally stable than it seemed when I started college.  Despite "progress" in some areas, there seems to be regression in many more. The global battles between self-righteous reactionaries in their various forms and the self-righteous revisionists in their various forms makes for a peculiarly unstable world, especially in social and political institutions that people otherwise would rely on in times of common crisis. 

 It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting.  Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined.  The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19^th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida.  And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed.  This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.    

 The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine.   The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life. 

So I don’t see much of a role for this Captain Future anymore, except following the lead of Captain Past. I doubt I’ll have much to say about contemporary politics anymore—it’s all the same drone, and out of my old hands.  What I may be able to offer is my particular perspective from these many years I've been around.  My own past now reaches back beyond the experiences of the vast majority.  Perhaps it’s an inevitable discovery of my time in life, or perhaps it’s an historical truth (or I suspect, something of both), but I feel more continuity with my parents and grandparents time than this present I find myself in, and certainly any future I can foresee. That’s certainly not what I expected in the 1960s.  In any case, this perspective is all I’ve got to contribute, aside from bearing witness.

 I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.)  I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.

 I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted.  Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me.  The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.  

 If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past.  When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s.  When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made.  In a sense, I am now such a link.

On Turning 78

 I've posted reflections on various birthdays on one or another of my various blogs through the years.  It occurs to me to re-post them in one place: here at Blue Voice.  These posts will appear consecutively but, in traditional blog fashion, in reverse chronological order.  So I begin with the latest: reflections on entering my 78th year, as of a few hours ago.

Not too long ago Margaret emailed this poem to me from another room. It’s called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon:

 I got out of bed

 on two strong legs.

 It might have been

 otherwise. I ate

 cereal, sweet

 milk, ripe, flawless

 peach. It might

 have been otherwise. 

I took the dog uphill

 to the birch wood.

 All morning I did

 the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate.  It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks.  It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

 

 The details differ but these are our days now. They are made up of repeated activities almost ritually enacted. Some are personal habits, some are best practices prudently repeated, others are simply what we do now. Many of ours happen to be enforced by our ritually-minded dog. He has his own personal rituals as well, that sometimes become part of ours.

 We cherish these elements of the day, more often consciously at this age. They approach the sacramental. For we know that at any moment it could be otherwise, and that someday, it will.

 As it happened, shortly after I received this poem I dipped into a volume of interviews with poets done by Bill Moyers called The Language of Life (1995.) I flipped through the pages, reading randomly, until I came upon the interview with the eminent anthologist and poet Donald Hall, and remembered that he and Jane Kenyon had been married.  He was devoted to her.  An interview with her was also included in this volume.  Both were probably done when Moyers did another documentary just on them in 1993, in their New England country home, which had been in Hall's family for generations. 

 At the time, Donald Hall had just survived two serious cancer surgeries. It was between those two surgeries that his wife Jane Kenyon wrote “Otherwise.” Hall was 64, and told Moyers he didn’t expect to live to 70.

 That isn’t what happened. Donald Hall lived until 2018, a few months shy of his 90th birthday. But even though Jane Kenyon was nearly 20 years younger than he, she contracted a very aggressive form of cancer and died in 1995, the year the Moyers book was published. So Donald Hall lived nearly 20 years longer, but without her.

 So we live now, gratefully, in the charmed space before the coming catastrophes. When it seems catastrophe may be coming for this country and this planet, of a kind we could never before even contemplate, not even in the years of the nuclear arms race. And inevitably catastrophe will come for us personally. It may not come for years or a decade or more, but it can come at any time. 

 When we retired eight years ago we did not travel. Many people do, but we had no desire to travel. Personally, I traveled enough in my working life, and those experiences still haunt my dreams. I may still fantasize other places, but the realities of travel grow more difficult every day, and not even primarily because of age. Although I suspect many people our age are less keen on going places.

 In fact for us, all public life has diminished. Covid had and still has a marked influence. We shop for food, we go to the beach or the forest or the shores of the bay. We walk but usually in the neighborhood with our dog Howdy. Mostly we are at home: Margaret, Howdy and me.  Margaret and I are both introverts who had occupations that required some very extroverted activities.  Now we don't.  Howdy likes it that way, too. 

 There is Zoom, and Margaret is on that pretty frequently. I’ve seen my doctor on it, participated in a few conversations with her family, that’s all. For me the drawbacks of social media outweigh advantages I can see. 

 I do miss focused opportunities to communicate something more or less meaningful from my life—a legacy still alive. It’s a cliché now—that the old have a lot to tell, a lot to share, and an eagerness to do so, but usually no one who is interested in hearing it. I know it was a long time before I was interested in the lives of my parents before my time. Or anything before my time. It was a long time before it even occurred to me that they might have anything relevant from their lives to tell me about what I was going through in my own. And by that time, they were gone. 

 To some extent I was right—when I was principally concerned with “career” in areas they had no knowledge of, and of navigating relationships including those that might lead to marriage, the rules of the games had changed so much—and they were also related to those places and strata that my elders didn’t know. But later, approaching middle age say, there were probably a lot of common areas, experiences and so on. Or if I knew more about their lives—what they were like, what they thought and felt at different points in their lives, I could draw my own conclusions. 

 It’s also context: now that I’m interested enough to research the past, the years in which they lived their lives, I have contexts in which their answers might make sense. I would experience the story. (This too is not uncommon; apparently as we get older, we become more interested in the historical contexts and events of our parents’ generation.) 

 As for telling my story or any part of it, even in fragments sharing anything learned in my life, well: Now I am so distant from family, I don’t see the next generation in their middle years or the generation following in their childhood. Or my sisters as they follow me into the 70s. And I share so little with the worlds in which Margaret’s children and grandchildren live, I have little to offer them, though I have a small positive place in their lives, I believe. 

 My status as a writer is so distant in time now that it no longer exists, so even in that regard I am not ever asked to offer anything from my life and experience. It is also distant somehow in space, for I have seldom been asked in the 28 years we’ve been here. I gave one talk derived from the mall book to a church service, one talk about the Federal Theatre Project to a theatre audience, and that’s it, over nearly three decades.

 At this point, my byline hasn’t been seen regularly for nearly a decade, but even when it was, no one thought to ask me anything. So I project my memories through the Internet, or at least (so far) very selective ones. I have my say to cyberspace, where potentially millions could read it, but which only a handful do. Many of those I suspect are my contemporaries. We talk to ourselves. 

 As for legacy beyond my life, what could it possibly be, and for whom? My writing disappeared along with the periodicals that printed it. My book may be re-purposed as a history (I’ve given up hope that it will ever be considered as literature) but only for a few. A few—a few at a time—it all I can hope for. A reader here or then who stumbles across something on the Internet. I know it happens, I occasionally hear from them in some way. I have no idea how long the servers will keep my words accessible, but it could be a kind of legacy.  At least for awhile.  

 People don’t seem interested in legacy anymore, unless from someone famous, whose possessions become negotiable currency as well as talismanic objects. In this age of de-cluttering, people don’t seem to keep things: no more attics of generational keepings, nothing that becomes more magical as the years go by.

But my world and this world grow increasingly different.  I have as few hopes of relevance as of anyone listening.  I haven't stopped writing, however.  That kind of faith is hard to shake.  It's too much a part of me, a big part, a defining part.  For better or worse, richer or poorer etc.

 For me the past is present, part of the rolling present, part of the texture of the days. Some of it doesn’t last. I read of pasts I haven't experienced and that process can delight me.  I seem to have absorbed something added to my perspective, but that can matter only in its function of adding texture to today. It’s the same with legacy, I suppose. We have no control over anything but the present, and only within ever increasing limits. So we adapt and we live as best and as happily as we can, until it is otherwise.