OPENING SALVO // Eusocial Distancing
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 2 // Issue 3 // Winter 2021 // APOCALYPSE
“A hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
Ever since reading these words by Elizabeth Kolbert in her book The Sixth Extinction in 2016, they have been spinning round and round in my head like a dark song lyric by Leonard Cohen or Neko Case. I find them strangely comforting. To know that you and everything you know and love will one day be gone is frightening to some, but it puts me in a mind of winter, like the poet Wallace Stevens’ snowman, who is so much part of his environment that he is barely distinguishable from it. He will certainly return back to the snowdust from which he came, but remains unperturbed, a state to which I aspire. Meditation helps. Not caring if people find you icy is a bonus.
I find Kolbert’s words reassuring in the way I find reassuring my dear friend and colleague Joshua Mehigan’s words at the end of his poem “Accepting the Disaster.” He writes, “...finally we accepted the disaster. / And crowds moved. Cities sang with grievances. / The luckiest suffered a hundred comeuppances. / Long wars were waged by secret caucuses. / Flesh-eating plants grew in the provinces. / The rich, sobbing, were dragged from their terraces. / The temples burned with heartfelt pointless promises. / And the round wind came across the dry plains daily.”
If you can concentrate on that “round wind,” the rest falls away: The boom and bust cycles of human frailty and valor, aggression and cooperation, sedition and salvation. Pestilence and famine. They all go on in the background, so much babble. Fortunes will be reversed. Institutions will fail. What polymath thinker Mark Moffett calls “The Human Swarm” will create new societies, thrive for a time, and then collapse. If your apocalypse is one election, one event in history, you may become distracted from what we can learn from these larger cycles, and how they might help us understand how to thwart the final doomsday that awaits us: The extinction of all human minds. Without coordination against existential threats, we are lost, and the great potential of the human race will have its light extinguished forever.
Here, I recall a comment made by Wynton Marsalis during a somewhat heated 2018 panel on race and swing in jazz. He commented that he felt as though he was having a conversation among his brothers and sisters that, while important, in the context of issues such as climate change, was occurring with all of them strapped in on an airplane taking a pronounced nosedive to nowhere. I remember thinking as I listened that the onramp to enlightenment does not stretch on forever. It may have at one time, but now that our knowledge has outstripped our wisdom, it’s go time. The sun may explode, yes, but it’s more likely that we’ll be the cause of our own destruction much, much sooner than that.
And so I’m ignorant, yet intensely interested, in what happens over time—geologic time. Evolutionary time. When I spoke with Kolbert about her book and raised the issue, she said, “We’re all bounded by our limited experience and our imagination, but I think we tend to live so much in the here and now, and so much in the last week, last month, even 24 hours. Try to step back—imaginatively, since that’s the only way you can do it—and really hang out with people who can look at a mountain and tell you how it formed 500 million years ago.”
Or how much we have changed or not in the last 50 million years, 10,000 years. Among biologists, there is a fascinating debate about how evolution is working, and the extent to which it is gene-level within an individual and whether evolution works at the group level as well. And while I’m not qualified to tackle that thorny topic, especially here, it raises other questions in my mind about how much we need to look at our species like other primates, and how much we need to consider that we’re like some of the other most successful species on the planet. Namely, that we’re similar to eusocial animals such as termites, bees, and ants, the favorite of biologist E.O Wilson, one of the scientists who believes that group selection does play a role in human evolution.
Social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has also entered the fray by postulating that we can think about our behavior as 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. It’s an important distinction, because it tells us about how we must consider our more altruistic and violent traits. Haidt believes that we may be at one of those rare moments in evolution where a species goes through a radical change. I find it fascinating that the change he believes is happening began when we did something to mirror how eusocial animals live—we started centering our lives around nests: In caves, in our case, but it radically changed the way we lived and related to one another.
As a species, our time may be where the water droplet falls to one side of Kolbert’s mountain or the other, ever so slightly making a groove that another drop and another follows until a path is set and, eventually, a river runs through the valley to its east, rather than forming a lake to its west. In the balance hangs whether we will hew to the best of these other kinds of animals, and shed the more troubling aspects. If we can see each other as individuals (as primates do) but not seek always to kill someone we don’t know at all (as some primates do), or we can cooperate en masse (like bees do) without losing our identity and settling into reflexive group think (like bees do), we may be alright.
It took only dozens of generations for Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev to breed, from wild foxes, tame foxes that shared behavior and physicality with domesticated dogs; we fool ourselves if we think that evolution can’t sometimes happen quickly, especially when someone’s thumb is on the scale. One needs only to look around and see giant thumbs everywhere, especially in Silicon Valley and in the great halls of the oligarchs, where there seems to be some sort of genetic mutation run amok.
So the question is, who are we? And what happens when our nest is destroyed by one harrowing cycle or another, by addiction and disaffection, “long wars waged by secret caucuses,” or an incoming asteroid? If our eusocial tendencies, centered around home, which for humans is no longer merely shelter but also culture—art, religion, social norms—is destroyed, does it also destroy our purpose or meaning as human beings? Do we then scroll endlessly, swarm endlessly, drifting, decaying, unthinking, and find no other center?
In Zombies in Western Culture, authors Vervaeke, Mastropietro, and Miscevic argue that the questions we are eternally asking ourselves—What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here?—are integral to why we’re here, and that in exploring these questions together, the meaning and beauty that results is the source of a true home and purpose for humans. In this regard, I might quibble with Mehigan’s temples burning with “pointless promises.” They might be untrue, but perhaps not as pointless as we atheists once believed. They may be, back to Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that holds in its song the wisdom we need to avert personal, political, and species-wide disaster. Sing it around a campfire, and the wolves and zombies, algorithms and asteroids, the demons of both self-doubt and self-assurance might be kept at bay. We might sing together until some metaphorical morning when we begin behaving as though not just the seven, but seven thousand, or seven million generations ahead of us are worth saving. //
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