Humility
The Dog Days of Summer
The first step in becoming humble, in recognizing what we don’t know and cannot control, is seeing our own true hand in a situation. Until we do that, solutions cannot be found. These are the dog days of summer…..
Fire, everywhere. Greece, the United States, Canada, Siberia, Australia. I don’t know about other places, but a strong argument can be made that the terrible fires in the U.S. are largely caused by decades of fire suppression (Smokey the Bear) allowing the build up of huge masses of tinder, not to mention building neighborhoods in areas sure to burn. Yes, the beetle infestation is a factor, and hot and dry summers, but we own a big part of this.
Covid Delta wave: We had it licked in the late spring, or so it seemed. Vaccines (three of them) that worked and many people wearing masks in crowded spaces. Now, three months later, it’s almost as bad as before, this time nearly all people who have not yet been vaccinated. How can it be that we have become stupid enough to politicize the health benefits of masks and vaccines, to somehow make this an issue of freedom instead of health? We have entirely forgotten the world before penicillin and vaccines, when life was cheap, many died, and people grasped at the chance to take a shot and protect themselves. They would look at us today and laugh. How did we beat polio? Everyone was vaccinated, end of story. Good God. Yet here we are with millions among us refusing to face the situation, in denial, pretending the virus itself is fake.
Afghanistan: Twenty years of war and the army we built and funded collapsed in two weeks. Somehow our initial limited mission to get Bin Laden and Al Queda morphed into something else, nation building. And then, when the Iraq invasion propaganda was in full swing, just before the invasion, millions around the world marched against war. No media mentions that today, those millions who were right, back then, and still are. Our history of invading other countries to remake them in some idealized democratic system is a terrible history, and we have learned nothing, it seems. Two Presidents could not end what Bush began. Now Biden has ended it and the media and pundits are howling. Tough break for the war industry, for sure, but a blessing to any parent of any kid in the services. And who do the media bring on to discuss Afghanistan? The very same people who howled for invading Iraq, remaking the Middle East, nearly all in some way connected to military contractors and think tanks.
A humble person faces facts, admits error, and learns from mistakes. Repeating the same mistake expecting a different outcome is a good definition of insanity. It seems we are close. We have been allowing the forests to fill with tinder for two or three generations. In the face of compelling evidence we still, or many among us, refuse to take simple, tested, proven health steps to defeat this virus. Despite, in my lifetime, having now twice invaded and tried to remake another nation, stayed way too long, and been entirely defeated, there are many in the Washington D.C. blob seemingly arguing that leaving Afghanistan is a mistake, and it seems these people are the ones filling all the air time.
I don’t see our leaders in the forestry industry howling and demanding funds to clear the tinder from forests, to allow controlled regular burns, to prevent construction in fire prone areas. I do see some among us demanding vaccine and mask requirements, but this could have been so easily handled had the last President said everyone needs a shot and a mask, again and again, starting in early 2020, but he did not and here we are. Finally a President came before the public and said Afghanistan was lost, and to protect American lives we were leaving, and the leaving would be difficult and messy, and the buck stops with him as to the outcome, and he has been vilified. Yet, to date, he seems the first among us to show some humility.
I hope we see more.
Humility (2)
During the last, say 150 years there has been unrelenting and consistent technological change in nearly all areas – medicine, communications, travel, energy, the list is seemingly endless. It is almost unbelievable, actually. Somehow there seems to have been a parallel assumption that we humans have also changed greatly, maybe because we think we must have changed to bring forth all these marvels, and maybe, even more, many of us think that with all these new wonderful tools the measure of people, their character and behavior, must be changing rapidly as well. There has been, for at least six or seven generations, a steady belief in inevitable progress in all areas, including the character and behavior of humans.
This is a huge, huge mistake, in my opinion, because human nature hasn’t changed despite all these technological breakthroughs. The evidence of our own eyes and memories, for those of us who have been around for eight or nine decades, is exactly the opposite, as is the historical record – we humans have been bad to each other, always and forever.
Go way back, Im mean, way way back, before farming, before towns and cities, the time of great ice and terrible animals, and humans barely hanging on in remote safe places. When a group invaded another group’s territory, back then, it seems they captured the women and children but killed off all the men, all of them, so there would not be retribution. Surely humans then, and in the years since, and today, are selfish, vengeful, hateful, lustful, cruel, possessive acquisitive, tyrants, murderers, just as humans are loving, caring, friendly, empathetic, self sacrificing, and noble.
Look over the last 150 years – many huge wars, hundreds of millions dead, maybe 70 million in the two World Wars alone. Millions more killed with famine, whether in China, Russia, India, Asia, or elsewhere. Millions more lost to disease. Remember that a century ago only smallpox had been defeated, there remained the scourge of measles, mumps, whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, rickets, cholera, not to mention millions more lost to raw poverty. Yes, it is true that today millions of people are living far better than their forebears, but does this mean human nature has changed? That the legacy of grim news that has underpinned all the technological triumphs will somehow miraculously end?
I think not. Somewhere in the rush to greatness, and the ability to build and invent great things, we seem to have entirely lost awareness that we are both good and evil, flawed and noble, and any excess – ANY – promises difficulty, death, destruction. Nowadays we may look back and consider earlier people cautious, conservative in behavior, keeping their heads down, but maybe the truth of the matter was they were raised humble, cautious, well aware of their own dark side, and the dark sides of others. Throughout all of history the battles have remained the same – on the one had wresting survival from a hostile world, which we humans successfully did such that the world seems now to be ours, but on the other hand always, since the beginning, struggling with the much larger danger – ourselves, our conflicts and fights, and these days our narrative driven views that only we are right and all others not only flawed but even evil.
In ancient times, when we were not the apex predator, the world was above us, more powerful, and we were careful, humble, cautious, because we had to be. Now we rule the world, but it has not been the world that has brought evil, it is ourselves, plain as day, brought forth in the urgency of ideology and zealotry and certain-ness, and further complicated because the public megaphones respond to only anger, rage, froth. My sense is the greater mass of us are sick of all of it, and want to just get on with our lives, as best we can, and all of us know that only through humility will come the wisdom to regain some kind of balance.
Charlie Sheldon's STORIES MADE US HUMAN 