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How should we live? In the here and now? Not quite, and we know it. The future looms. We have to anticipate. We use today to make tomorrow possible, which in turn we use to make the day after tomorrow possible.
Call it a rat race if you like. Yes, rats do it too, in their way. Life lives each day making set-up shots, aiming today's cue ball so that it lays as well as possible for tomorrow's shot.
Sure we should stop to smell the roses, but we should then resume our work cultivating those roses so that we will be able to stop to smell them again tomorrow.
Hopefully, we evolve greater efficiency with time, aiming our shots ever more skillfully so tomorrow's shot isn't such a scramble. That way, tomorrow, we'll have a little more time to stop to smell those roses than we did today.
Are you better off today than you were yesterday? Today, does it take less work to set up tomorrow than it did yesterday to set up today?
During this economic crisis, the answer for many of us is, "No, it takes more work." Many of us are scrambling to rebuild faster than things crumble. Many of us are not keeping up.
And many more of us will soon not be keeping up, as things crumble at an accelerating rate. Ice caps for example. Children these days fill me with awe: Oy, the disasters they'll witness. And they fill me with shame: Oy, what they'll think of us for how we squandered these precious pivotal years, tipping our planet over into irrevocable climate chaos. They'll wonder why we weren't more foresightful.
Yes, why aren't we? Are we becoming more nearsighted?
Recently yes, somewhat. We've gotten more myopic largely due to the radically increased potency of our "myopium," the various drugs we all take that make us euphorically shortsighted.
In the past few centuries our drug pushers have figured out how to promise, and to some extent deliver whatever we want faster, cheaper, and more seductively, not just in the drug market but in all of retail, and not just in retail but everywhere desire runs high-finance and entertainment for example, and especially in politics where we increasingly expect our politicians to affirm us, flattering us that we deserve more, that we are right about everything, that the future shines brightly, that we are entitled.
Entitlement means two opposite things: Truly what we're due and falsely what believe we're due but aren't. Ironically, the politicians pushing the strongest myopium these days are the ones most opposed to entitlement programs, most of which are true entitlements, services we're due given past investments. The Reagan Revolution that launched our great deficit run-up was to myopium what Chronic is to Mexican shake from the sixties. Orders of magnitude more intoxicatingly myopic.
In a way, our more powerful strains of myopium signal progress. Today we really do get more and pay less. Over the past few centuries we have busted the myth that there are no free lunches. Of course there are free lunches. Some methods of accomplishing things are decidedly more efficient than others, freeing us up to work less and take longer lunch breaks.
In fact, though we say there are no free lunches, we don't believe it. In practice, we have come to expect them, indeed to expect more of them than there really are.
Our new, more powerful strains of myopium signal progress, but also the downside of progress. Over the millennia, we have gotten much more foresighted, and yet also more long-leveraged. We've become so efficiently leveraged that we're spinning off side effects that make the day after tomorrow much harder to manage. It's not that we're losing our ability to plan ahead but that planning ahead becomes much more difficult at the rate we're generating leveraged unintended consequences.
An anthropologist friend of mine says the heyday for hominids was Homo Erectus, living sustainably with the use of one tool, doing today what worked reliably for a run of tomorrows that lasted over 1.5 million years (Homo Sapiens has lived .25 million years). Homo Erectus were on the cusp, more animal than human and yet on the verge of life's boldest experiment in foresight since the evolution of the first brains.
The rat, in his way has foresight, not enough to write a business plan or envision building a better mousetrap (not that she would want to). But a rat has memory and an ability to integrate a lot of data in form of rat knowledge, knowledge for example of how to get through a maze.
Memory is the key to foresight. The best way to prepare for the future is to integrate the past. The past is a terrible guide to the future; but it's the best guide available. For a rat, it's the only guide available.
Brains make learning possible, the formation of new memories in real-time over the course of a life. Plants don't have brains, and therefore can't form new memories in real-time over the course of their lives. But they still have memory of a sort, the kind that passes down as evolutionary inheritance from plant to seed to plant.
All adaptations are a kind of foresight, the adaptive ability to set up those runs of good play that last not just an organism's life, but its whole lineage's. Evolution is the survival of the instinctively foresight-ful. But, compared to our foresight, other organisms' foresight is of a very limited kind.
As I've described elsewhere in more detail, the grand precarious evolutionary experiment we Homo Sapiens represent centers on our capacity to use symbols, language mostly, to communicate to each other but more importantly to think, to see in our minds eyes detailed alternative models, theories of how things work, have worked and might work. We are homo theoreticus. Our theories make us very efficient at finding those setup shots, to build a bridge, to invent alternative energy sources, to design a computer, to build an empire, to become emperor, to plan genocide, to invent the car, but also to ignore the car's effects on the day after tomorrow, and those roses our children may not get to smell.
