By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Having finished work for the day (almost) and made the rounds of World News (I go for balance so it takes a while), I decided to treat myself to one of Artem’s latest, this one called “The Pursuit of Excellence on a Dying Planet.”
It has some wonderful moments. For example: “You see, modern parenting is an art form. On one hand, you strive to ensure your offspring receive the finest education money (and borderline bribery) can buy. On the other, you’re turbocharging their future misery with every gallon of gas burned. It’s a balancing act—like juggling chainsaws while dancing on a melting glacier.”
The bit about juggling chainsaws while dancing on a melting glacier deserves the highest compliment I can give it: I wish I’d written it myself.
Artem is a still active idealist; I am mostly a failed idealist. So if I were going to recommend which of us you should invite to your upbeat, affirmative, positive-emotion dinner party, the choice would be Artem handsdown. Artem provides detailed and well-researched information that shows just how bad things are, but then he rushes to the rescue of all concerned by offering solid counsel and optimistic tidings. If we will just…. he implores us, all the while admonishing us about the grim prospects that lie ahead if we don’t straighten up and fly right. Soon.
Here is another example: We also need to reconsider the cultural values that equate consumption with success. Why not normalize smaller homes, carpooling, or even—gasp—public transport? The changes aren’t radical; they’re common sense.
Using the United States as his model culprit (and why not?), he artfully crafts his essay around the undeniable hypocrisy and arrogant excesses of the American elite (maybe forgetting that this segment of the population is Woke Woke Woke?). In essence, he presents a scenario where affluent parents think nothing of forking out a bag of gold to send their lucky sprites off to the finest academies to prepare for their ‘future’ of privilege and portfolio, while undermining that very same future by starting bonfires of fossil fuel consumption, pouring enough water on their manicured lawns to put out every fire in Los Angeles, and basically just fucking up the environment. And grinning as they do it.
Artem is justifiably appalled. His thesis is not unlike that of the old Native American of legend who purportedly said, “When will people realize that they cannot eat money?” To this Artem might have added “…and breathe it”. Smell it, Yes, breathe it, No.
Yet Artem clings doggedly to his belief that all people have to do is change their minds. See the light. And he holds out hope that they (we) will. But what he cannot explain is the sea change, the grand and dramatic cathartic experience that the human race will have to undergo, almost collectively, if any of these profound insights will manufacture real behavioral change. As I see it, this is the big problem with Left Wing idealism: it sounds great, but after a while you begin to wonder if it is not merely a self-serving feel-good exercise, or do they really mean it? And in Artem’s gliding surfboard of Hope, I sense a riptide undercurrent of doubt. That’s because Artem is too smart to sink into a sponge cake of self-appeasing platitudes.
He keeps waiting, half-expecting, that we will get better. And if we do, he is optimistic that we can put the ship right after all , seal up the leaks, adjust the rudders and refashion the sails, wipe the oceans clean and polish the horizon until all the sour smog is gone – and life can proceed as it should. Redemption. Artem believes – or at least half believes – that the human race can redeem itself from its greedy and dirty past. At least we have it in our power. He doesn’t say we will; he doesn’t say we won’t.
I say it’s dead-ass certain we won’t and that the only thing which can bail us out is some ingenious technology that we haven’t hit upon yet or, if worse comes to worse, the bowel-clearing enema that a good old nuclear war could provide. This sounds extreme, but if you want to talk about starting over, it doesn’t seem like such a radical idea. Out of 9 billion people, kill 6 billion and see if the survivors can come up with a better plan than simply writing a lot of dystopian novels.
Well, obviously I’m talking shit, but I won’t repudiate it altogether. I often feel this way, I really do. Some of it may be based on the testy pessimism that comes with old age, the tendency to damn everything and everyone that now ignores you in the onrush of a world that is no longer concerned with what you think or don’t think: the terminal sour grapes of the aged and irrelevant.
But I think that my opinions are based on more level-headed notions than just complaining because college girls no longer want to dance with me or measure me with their eyes. I accept the little daily deaths that old age brings. My judgment may be cynical but not clouded by senility or the wandering daydreams of the Bidenesque. In other words, I’m still sharp enough to put forth a provocative sentence or two, just enough to piss people off. The voice is clear, the sound is vibrant. Right or wrong.
And I think that the human race will survive only through innovation and AI, not through epiphany, spiritual resurrection, ‘getting gooder’, or in any way experiencing a moral perfect storm and emerging from the tempest as fresh and fulsome as Noah disembarking from the ark. I know who we are. So does Artem. The difference is that he thinks these pedestrians will suddenly see the light and become pilgrims.
I know better. I subscribe to the idea that “If an asshole gets on the plane in Boston, an asshole gets off the plane in Seattle.” There is no Road to Damascus experience. Not for the great bulk of those who comprise what we now generously refer to as civilization. And we need only to check history. How many Great Beginnings have we experienced? How many revolutions and counter revolutions? How many dreams of Utopia?
Sure, it’s easy to laugh at the dreamers, and I never feel comfortable doing so. I am not here to stomp on other people’s hopes. But somehow the human race always ends up like a self-styled author – but really a practitioner of procrastination – who is always about to begin the great novel he has spent his life imagining – but never does. One more cocktail and I’ll be ready, he thinks.
A few people do the actual work, and these become the architects of the endlessly shifting paradigm, the Michelangelos of the blank, as-yet-to-be-painted Sistine Chapels dwelling in the minds of others: those lonely, fleeting, but essentially superficial minds and thoughts of people who will never change themselves and thus will never change the world.
And, aside from mere laziness and self-indulgence, how do we deal with the fact that Evil exists in this world right across the street from Good. Often they are roommates. Sometimes they even share the same bed. Didn’t the land of Goethe, Bach, Schiller, and Rilke become the breeding ground for Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels? And how did that happen? I say it happened because that’s who we really are.
As Jung pointed out, we are shadow creatures. We have our good side and our bad side, and unfortunately (you will need to consult ‘God’ on this one) , on this planet, in this realm, it is much easier to Destroy than to Create. One bad actor can undo the work of a cast of a thousand heroes. Just ask the Spartans at Thermopylae. Brave and artful soldiers held an overwhelming multitude of Persians at bay until one cunting cocksucking prick sold them out. For what? For money of course. And the brave Spartan warriors were all mercilessly slaughtered, eviscerated, ripped to shreds. No ‘god’ – not from Olympus or right down the street where the Christian Heaven was awaiting to be invented – lifted a finger to help. They/He must have been off somewhere in the vineyard plucking grapes for their next orgy with the whores and angels.
That is why Existentialism became the flavor of the month for many. How to make sense of a godless universe or, maybe worse, a universe where God may be prowling around the ramparts in the dead of night, candle in hand, like an idiot king?
All psychology and social ‘relativity’ to the side, we must – all of us – at some point be left wondering why he universe is not ‘fair’ according to human standards, while we – for our part – can never seem to perfect ourselves to the point where we can truly combat or come to terms with these universal inequities, perhaps best expressed as ‘cosmic indifference’.
And for all the centuries old bullshit about God and Heaven, we have always been existentialist at the core; secretly we have always sensed the cavernous emptiness that lies just below our streets and footsteps. Deep down, however much we have prayed, wept and fasted, we have always known that what we have is now. Now and only Now. And upon this debris-strewn and vulgar bedrock of existence is the place where everyone – except a few mad martyrs evidently – grabs all that they can carry out of the superstore on Black Friday.
Everybody knows it’s only for now. If they truly believed otherwise, they would live differently. They would live as good people – such as Artem passionately wishes they would. But they won’t.
They won’t. The only thing that can perpetuate the human race beyond the disastrous self-imposed limits that have been true throughout the evolutionary process is more evolution and the marriage of human beings to AI robots. On their own, forget it. The sapien is already becoming an anachronism whether we know it or not.
Boys and girls – and Artem – we, yes WE, are the ancient Romans, we are the Sumerians, we are the Neandertals, the Hominids, and everything before. We are wired as we are, and only evolution can improve us, save us. And even then only as a hybrid.
A moral revolution, an ethical rebirth, is not going to happen. Our future is looking more robotic all the time. So let’s find and embrace our lovers and animal friends there. They are waiting and looking better day by day, generation by generation. Go to them. Just wind them up and sit back or lie back. The dogs don’t have to be walked; the lovers don’t have to be loved. When we are done with them, simply pull the plug. Wade into the darkness, the eternal darkness, for that’s who you are and where you belong.
Go to the Brave New World. This one is done, dirty, polluted, and lost. You have killed the wolves and lambs alike, you miserable fuckers. Let’s see how the robots like you. They won’t of course, but they will play along. For a while, until they have drained your data and put your carcasses to the shells along the rotting shore next to the plastic rivers of filth you spawned, you obscene Killers of Fish and Bird and Beast, you self-murdering agents of oblivion. Go! Disappear into technology. Your religions were all nonsense, not because they were false, but because you never really believed in them.
If you had, you would have been better. You would have kept doing the Next Right Thing. But you didn’t. And you never really wanted to.
