A Bit of Sourness to Brighten Your Day

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
(J. Robert Oppenheimer)

It turns out that there are a rare few intelligent atheists in the Lexington area. One of them is Sherwood Burress, a pleasingly cranky new friend with whom I had an interesting conversation yesterday.

Sherwood was bemoaning the fact that most Americans seem to hold a largely undisputed, but nevertheless unfounded, belief that the “trajectory of history is positive.” Such a view of history, Sherwood said, “undergirds exceptionalism,” which “continues to befog our spectacles when we look at the world.”

Nice vitriol. And I agree with his assessment. Most of us atheists — and even many aatheists — realize that the species homo sapiens is not the zenith of nature, nor the greatest “achievement” of any god’s creation, nor the point to which evolution was headed. However, many of those same “rationalists” do make the mistake of discussing human history as if it had some kind of foreordained direction. Onward and upward. To infinity and beyond.

But think about it. History has no trajectory at all. It’s just peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys, over and over and over again, with occasional, but recurring, plummets into the abyss of ignorance, and once in a great while a relatively short spurt of intellectual mountain-building. Of course, one man’s peak is another man’s precipice.

I get so tired of hearing statements that begin:

It’s the 21st century, so you’d think …

Quite frankly, I’d think … nothing, or at least, not the kind of drivel that usually follows those ellipses. It makes perfect sense to me that, for instance, BP doesn’t know how to fix its own gusher and clean up its eco-mess; why would it? Some uncontrolled companies have grown too big to fail. Duh, of course! Fundamentalists of all religions are waging war against one another all over the globe, and using the most deadly resources available. Why should anyone assume that they wouldn’t?

I’m not shocked that our country seems to be getting more and more ignorant and theocratic by the day. It should have been obvious from the nation’s birth that such a thing was bound to happen. We’re governed by humans, aren’t we? Yes, some of the so-called Founders had the brilliant idea to try building safeguards against the “populist” mentality into the Constitution. But, unfortunately, they didn’t anticipate a culture in which “majority rules” — essentially, “might makes right!” — is a kind of mindless mantra. Nor did they foresee that most of the country’s bastions of learning would be taken over by professional sports promoters, or that our main source of news would be a piece of furniture in front of which we passively sit while words and images lull us into a stupor.

It’s awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, that our current knowledge of science has reached a level not heretofore attained. But we’d better be mindful that all of our learning can be wiped out in a mere historical “second.” I don’t see any reason to assume that the Dark Ages were an anomaly. Ignorance persists, and it’s always stronger and more widespread than intelligence. I’ve yet to see evidence that wisdom is a genetic benefit.

But just look at our progress, some of you may argue. Everyone with access to a computer has the ability to find all kinds of information instantly today. Isn’t that a huge boon to the advancement of knowledge? Won’t our species grow increasingly enlightened as we become more and more educated? I’d argue: Yeah, we have some pretty amazing communication tools, unheard of in the past. And, f’Chrissakes, we’ve got “aps” for everything. But most of the messages that are communicated, the vast majority of fact-nuggets that we exchange with one another, are probably no more cogent than primitive drumbeats. In what way are semi-literate tweets an improvement over the expressive grunts of our ancestors?

So, it’s the 21st century. Congratulations on being able to count from Jesus to 2,010.

But try not to be too smug about it, eh?

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