| When the literary world disagreed with Mind
at the End of its Tether, I believe it was only
because it missed the very valid point that Wells was
making only because, good writers though many of its
critics may have been, they just did not understand
evolution and Darwin and his whole concept of natural
selection and the struggle for life. Wells is making a
very valid point that "ordinary man is at the end of
his tether" and that "homo sapiens in his present form
is played out." Wells may have been making the most
important point of the century. It is a keen
observation that homo sapien at his best is "curious,
teachable, and experimental from the cradle to the
grave." That is perhaps a more insightful definition
of homo sapien than perhaps even the paleoantologists
offered, back when they called us thinking man. What
is more the book is the distilled wisdom of
everything he ever wrote, one need not own any other
book he ever wrote. He even said this himself. It
touches on the fundamentals of every aspect of his
motif, and it serves as a great quick reference to the
essentials as well. I love what he says about
relativity. Its compactness is attractive and
practical. It has perhaps more relevance today, actually, than when wrote it.
What is going on here with people just sitting
back and waiting for global warming to do us in? I found
the answer in Mind at the End of its Tether, by H.G.
Wells. Apparrently, "the mind is retrospective, to the
end." "We live in reference to past experience, and
not to future events, no matter how inevitable." And
he says: "But the masses of our fellow creatures have
not that vision to sustain them, and we have to square
our everyday conduct to theirs."
Thus we see what the problem is: we need to evolve, if we want to save
ourselves. Now current theories suggest that that can only happen if some
random mutation in an individual is by chance favorable, and that person
reproduces thus replacing "ordinary man" who is quote "at the end of his
tether". Such progress only takes place over geologic time, and by then, that
might be too late. Or is it? Folks, lets not give up too easily, Wells clearly
hints
at the problem: "the mind is retrospective to the end." How about we start
thinking about the future, expanding our minds and doing what Darwin says
has to happen, which is, in the words of Wells: "adapt or perish".
We might think at this point we have dead ended, as though Wells, this
overlooked writer who may have held the key to humanity's survival, in a
sense relegated to obscurity, was our only last hope. But as Yoda said in Star
Wars, "there is another", and as it turns out after some thought I have found
this other thinker. He is Jacob Bronowski. Though I shamefully do not have
any of his books, I had at some point in my life, not too long ago, written down
his words in my journal from my Dad's library. He said:
"No kind of Magic will do. We have to establish a unitary sense of the human
situation, of the fact that cognitive knowledge is the one thing that human
beings have been endowed with. That this has made us the only animal that
does not fit into the evolutionary niche, but that carves out its own, that
makes
its physical and mental and cultural environement. And a crucial part of
making that cultural environment is to see that the only plan we follow is the
great, unbounded, ethical plan of a set of values by which we direct our
actions because that's how we are. That is the way to be human."
Magic, Science and Civilization |