Coded gray.

Sunday 29 August 2004

Screenshot CoH

Pic of the day: Screenshot from City of Heroes. Because even imaginary worlds eventually become modern. No matter how much magic and alien invasions, there will always be cell phones.

Assumption of progress

"Trust synchronicity" as James Redfield uses to say. (Synchronicity, for those not used to Jungian psychology, is meaningful coincidence. Jung may have thought that we made up the meaning in the coincidence, but most of his New Age disciples seem to think of it as hints dropped by some higher being, possibly God or the Universe.)

In this case, it was almost certainly my own subconscious that dropped hints. After I finished the paperback I reviewed three days ago, I thought of the entry after it and one about my fantasy world "Master of Magic 2000". Perhaps I will still write that one. But meanwhile I started on an e-book (as usual bought from Fictionwise). The books is sold as an alternate history novel, one of my favorite genres. But it turned out to also – or even mainly – have another aspect. It is the story of two souls who get reincarnated again and again, and what they learn (or not) from their lives when they look back in the Bardo, the Tibetan realm of the dead between lives.

Be that as it may, it is an alternate history in which the Black Death does not kill a third or a half of Europe's human population, but 99.99% or a bit above that. The entire continent is basically devoid of human life, thus conveniently removing the European civilization from the further history.

***

What strikes me is the automatic assumption that much the same technology would be invented somewhere else by someone else. I guess if he really believes in the thing about souls diving into the world again and again, the souls of Isaac Newton etc would still show up somewhere and basically do their usual stuff, but could they really do the same without standing on the shoulders of the same giants?

To me, it seems far from automatic that we came this far. Progress has not been automatic for all of human history. Rather it was common with a pattern of progress and regress. Empires expanded, stagnated and collapsed. Knowledge accumulated, but slowly, and parts of it were lost again. The Great Library of Alexandria was lost to the flames, and much of the literature there was never heard of again. Probably most of it was trash, as most of anything is trash. But we don't know for sure, there may have been gems there that could have changed history if they came in the right hands.

Today, the accumulation of knowledge (or at least data) has become an irresistible flood that washes with it everything and changes the face of the world. But this is a rather recent development. It is so easy for us to view the past through the eyes of today, but it is not fair and not very useful. Unless you believe this is a God-created present, meant to be from eternity. If you believe in Fate, then it had to happen somehow. But if not, then things could easily have been very different. Unimaginably different.

***

I see the same thing in biology. Much as it irks me to have to agree with Stephen Jay Gould (God rest his soul), there is really nothing but religious faith that argues that we were meant to be. Nature should not, if left to itself, have any plans to create humans. This takes a God, and as such is outside the realm of science. Objectively speaking, humanity is not the crown of creation, the top of a pyramid built by all living things through four billion years. Rather we are a twig on the bush of life, which has grown randomly and been pruned by accident. Indeed, multicellular life might not have shown up at all if not for the greatest disaster since the making of the moon. More than 700 million years ago, the continents were strung out around the equator, stopping the circulation of heat between the tropics and the poles. The oceans froze over, incredible as this may sound to us. Then CO2 built up for millions of years until it reached a level to melt the ice, and for a while intense heat scoured the planet, before it froze over again. After all this, plants and animals in our sense of the word show up for the first time.

It is generally agreed that the Age of Mammals came after the sudden collision of Earth with an asteroid that wiped out the dominant lifeforms of its time, the dinosaurs. But it is not the first such abrupt change. Large amphibians ruled long before, and their extinction was even more dramatic than the end of the dinosaurs. There may have been as much as five of these mass extinctions, each of which went beyond even the horrors humanity is inflicting on the ecosystem.

What I say is that you can basically hold one of two views: Either we were meant to be here, and this implies some higher conscious and powerful force (God, Fate, Galactic civilization). Or it just happened, and a million other worlds could have been ours today, if things had happened slightly differently in the past. To think that humanity, or democracy, were Meant To Be by the very laws of nature is pretty arrogant. At the very least the burden is on you to point to some law of nature that accounts for it. Does the law of gravity cause America to rule the world? Does electromagnetism cause man to be everything's measure? Point and tell!

And to think that progress will necessarily continue is outright dangerous. In the world's most powerful nation today, universities churn out knowledge like enormous factories. But the populace is detached and willfully ignorant. Many, perhaps even most, prefer simple myths over knowledge. It is not just that they are unable to grasp the truth, they simply dislike it or at best hold it to be equal to any random lie. Nor is this limited to one nation, although it is particularly well documented there.

Unless we defend the search for truth, it will be silenced by those who claim to have found it. But it should be evident to you that truth does not fear questions. Lies and guilt bring this fear, as anyone should know who has ever raided the cookie jar.


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: Asexual fantasy?
Two years ago: Lightwielder fantasy
Three years ago: News on the Net
Four years ago: The burn-out
Five years ago: Childish games

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