There’s a thing in aviation that’s always stuck in my head. There comes a time when your eyes are fucking useless. Zero visibility. A sea of gray and white clouds that fucks with your head and subjects you to sensory illusions. You don’t think you’re flying straight, but you are. Your body is lying to you, your eyes aren’t giving you anything to work with, and it’s easy to feel you’re on the precipice of disaster. The worst mistake is to panic, but that’s exactly what you want to do.
You’re flying in the soup.
Yesterday
Yesterday Squirt was raging while we drove down the road. He had been forced to read “the stupidest thing he’s ever read” and I was just…so fucking proud. The point of the piece he had to read for his assessment testing made the assertion that agriculture was the biggest blunder of humanity. This is actually a thing I’ve encountered a couple times. In fact, my favorite historian Yuval Noah Harari flirts with it in Sapiens. On the face of it, of course, there is some merit. We were ‘healthier,’ more active, saw less disease overall, had stronger social ties, and almost certainly functioned with a higher level of equality.
Of course, we were also sneak thieves slinking in the weeds like jackals to eat rotting meat that was brought down by the stronger animals we worshipped as gods. A bad cut or a compound fracture was generally a death sentence. Many children died before their first birthday along with many mothers. Humans lived short pitiful lives terrified of what was out in the dark waiting to eat us.
But at least we weren’t shackled to a plow, right?
That article up there is written by a very intelligent guy. He’s also written a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. It’s interesting, I had just put this very book on my wish list and then I found his article today looking up something for this piece. An interesting little fluke which, incidentally, is the title of the book I am currently reading that mentioned Diamond.
Do you know why I read books like this?
Because I’m flying in the soup and it’s goddamn terrifying.
The Night
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in fear of the night. They huddled around a safe fire fearing what might be coming for them. Now we huddle around our televisions and our phones in the middle of the night fearing what might be coming for us. Climate Change. Drones. Cancer. Peak Oil. Trump. Liberals. Transfolk. AI. Starvation. For the night is dark and full of terrors.
The night has always been here, but Squirt recognizes that there is light too. He recognizes that agriculture is a step towards that light. A step to push the darkness a little further back and a nudge away from stagnation. I’m really proud that he recognizes this. I’ve done a little bit of my job as a parent if I’ve instilled this into him. I’ve got him looking into the future instead of into the past, facing forward instead of desperate for some magical fairy tale when things were better.
You don’t find the light by looking backwards into the darkness we’ve been crawling out of for millennia.
Turbulence
Squirt also stumbled upon a Covid mask a couple days ago that says “2020 Sucks.” Thanks again for that, Uncle. Squirt joked that he was going to wear it to school because he’s “preparing for hantavirus” which was worth a chuckle the first time he said it. But it also led to me pointing out that they were predicting a pandemic before Covid and it’s only a question of when the next pandemic will show up.
Unless AI kills us all first, right?
Bill Gates released something today: The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. And, yes indeed, I am stealing that one word from him for my own title. It’s a phenomenal piece. It’s something I think everyone reading this should take time out and go read first because, frankly, what he’s saying is more important than what I’m saying. Pretty sure I’m not supposed to say stuff like that on my own substack, but here we are.
There are some pretty spooky things in his piece. Stunted childhood development. Rampant inequality. More stupidity than ever. Empowered criminals. Biological warfare. Economic depression. Crushing unemployment.
They will all come true. The night is full of terrors.
Tomorrow
Gates goes on to talk about how he wants to see the world handle it. Some great ideas in there and I think some of it will actually happen as well. But the ideas will not prevent the darkness, the darkness will come just like the nightmares that followed our first planted crop. It’s baked into finding the light to bring a deeper darkness at first. But I’ll be watching everything he throws out there and hoping that others listen to him.
Despite that one ‘D’ that my least favorite history professor gave me, I actually think I’m pretty versed in history for a layman. With what I know, I firmly believe that my generation has seen more change than any that came before it. The Scientific Revolution ran for over 150 years. The Industrial Revolution around 80 years. I am just past 40 and yet my entire life would be almost completely unrecognizable to the child I was when I was Squirt’s age. I cannot imagine what Squirt’s life will look like in thirty years.
It’s only getting faster. We’re only building more tools. Vaccines in months. AI that reads a meaningful amount of human information and exceeds the smartest mathematician in the world. Weapons that can bring a global power to a standstill. But we’re still the same humans huddled around our fire terrified of the night. We’re still using tools that are going to burn us and feed us and protect us.
I don’t know where we’re going. We’re in the fucking soup just like we always have been. But I do choose to believe we’re flying somewhere. Flying somewhere both beautiful and terrible.
This is who we are. We are beautiful. We are terrible. We are confused and terrified and lost, but hopefully we remember the first rule of being here in the soup: don’t panic.
Squirt Says…
The world even as we get farther [toward] the light will always have the dark. It is constant with light you must have dark [and] with dark you must have light. It is simply impossible to be in a perfect society. Agriculture was the only reason we're here today that we aren't in some cave somewhere sitting by a fire, but as you said there was an increase in sickness — we were healthier before it. With dark must come light. We may have the biggest lantern we have ever had but the forest stretches to keep up with the lantern and in the forest is dark.
Dad Responds…
I like it. No matter how big our lantern gets the forest will always be bigger and have shadows.
