No, instead I want to wax optimistic. Tastefully named Alexis Madrigal points to an old journal written by a Russian surgeon, isolated in Antarctica, suffering acute appendicitis. He had no choice but to operate on himself:
I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders -- after all, it's showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time -- I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn't notice them ... I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and ...Alexis writes: "Two weeks later, he was back on regular duty. He died at the age of 66 in St. Petersburg in 2000. Just a little reminder that humans can complete some pretty amazing physical feats when their lives hang in the balance."
At the worst moment of removing the appendix I flagged: my heart seized up and noticeably slowed; my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it's going to end badly. And all that was left was removing the appendix ... And then I realised that, basically, I was already saved.
Earlier this evening I came across, while digging through files on my computer, favorite quotes of Thomas Edison (TAE's personal hero). This one stepped out in front of me:
"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."These quotes both reach towards a similar conclusion for me. This human animal is capable of so much good. Once the evolutionary map of our species was sufficiently written, our species rapidly and convincingly dominated the entire planet. In geological time, our species has spread in the blink of an eye. One thousand years is barely enough to move tectonic plates five feet. In that time we went from hunter gatherers to organized civilization. Another five feet of tectonic movement had us building large nation-states and orchestrating trade routes across continents. Another five feet and we were building fleets to cross oceans. Another five feet and our species was on the moon and sending robots to drive around Mars.
Remember, the fact that we've gone from loose bands of people with no written language to space-capable creatures that have beaten hunger in less than 6,000 years is a fair comparison to every other species in Earth's history which so far has been unable to achieve anything comparable over millions of years. The dinosaurs, titans of an earlier Earth, had hundreds of millions of years...literally thousands of times longer than the modern history of our species, and they never once started a campfire. They never once painted a picture on a cave wall.
It is in this spirit that we must realize just how much we are capable of...when we work together. Engineers, working together went from an erratic V-2 missile in 1946 to orbiting human beings via rocket in 1959. Standing together, the people of Egypt toppled their leader. Together, humans have built Wikipedia into the single largest repository of easily accessible information in the history of the known Universe.
But the fundamental premise behind editing a Wikipedia article is that you gain nothing from doing it. You already know the information you are typing. You aren't doing it for you. You are doing it for everyone else. Wikipedia grows because somewhere, down deep inside even the most selfish egghead there is this need to share the contents of the brain with others. People see an error in Wikipedia and think "oh, that's wrong. I could fix that." And with self-satisfaction they do. But they don't get any smarter. They don't gain any personal wealth or accolade. Finding the online identity of a wiki editor is laborious. Finding the real identity behind that avatar is nearly impossible. If you have fixed an entry...you are probably the only person who knows you did it.
The reason I wax so poetically about Wikipedia is specifically because it is a (nearly) universally accessible method by which the human race can mitigate knowledge hoarding by the elite. While I laud the hours of research a physicist may have done to achieve successful storage of hydrogen storage in palladium (I went to grad school, remember), it is no longer necessary to be a physicist to read about it and understand what they did. Wikipedia specifically, and the internet in general, is creating a situation where knowledge inequality is being eliminated.
Of course there is a backlash. People claim that the internet has destroyed their livelihood. This is possible. It is specifically because the rise of society sloughs off certain aged economies that social welfare programs must exist. But that is a topic much more in the realm of a philosophical leftist like Freddie DeBoer.
Instead let us get back on topic: the capabilities of the human species. Last month and before, I have ranted and orated and ranted some more about the complete collapse of the environment, and how I believe the biosphere on this planet has been forced along a path that is unsustainable and that humanity is set up in such a way that we cannot legislate a fix..and human nature does not accept the sacrifices necessary for the fix either.
But it does not have to be so! Even as I type this, I realize my petty words will reach almost no one; my suggested actions will affect even fewer. In my back and forth with Benjamin Dueholm over the essence of monogamy he has made an invaluable point: regardless of whether our ancient, proto-human ancestry was monogamous or polygamous, humans are (perhaps uniquely in the entire animalian history of Earth) capable of choosing to be or not be monogamous as we wish.
This choice...the simple ability to say "yes" or "no" ad infinitum is the most powerful tool Nature (or God or whatever) ever bestowed upon a species.
And so I guess what I want is for people to start choosing to see the good in each other. Can I see the good in Sarah Palin? It wouldn't be easy. Pointing out a good quality in a person you despise is really hard without mentioning the qualities you hate first. Can I see the good in Glenn Beck? Can I see the good in Nancy Pelosi? Can I see good in Steve Jobs?
Before compelling my readership to do anything, I must do it myself. And so I challenge you, readers, to do what I am actively trying (with limited success I must admit) to do: regardless of my feelings towards a person and their opinions I will try to see the good in them.
People are idiots. People are hypocrites. People are greedy and self-serving and stuck in their ways. People are spiteful. People are egomaniacal or narcissistic or both. But if we all start focusing on the good in each other: people can sacrifice, people can work hard, people can respect each other, people can laugh and cry and hug each other...if we start seeing those things, it becomes easier for us to work with them, and they with us. In short, it becomes easier to work together and stop mucking up the future.
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