Human Time and God's Time

One of the many reasons I enjoy John Michael Greer's blog is that his posts, and the comments, spur me to write about things I find fascinating but might ordinarily let pass, and inspire me to make time to post something new. Today he wrote about the term "Anthropocene," newly popular among the ecologically-minded. 

The term is meant to reflect the fact that humans are transforming the face of the planet as deeply as the asteroid did at the end of the dinosaur era, or as deeply as the Earth ripping open at the end of the Permian. Therefore, they argue, we can't call this era by the old biological or geological classifications; it is an era in which the chemistry of the air, the acidity of the seas, the temperature, the albedo, the animal and plant species, are all defined by humans. It is, they say, the Anthropocene. 

Greer is not fond of the new term, and gives a good argument as to why, which I won't sum up here. I did, however, contribute my own thoughts: 

You make an interesting point, JMG. 

A bit of rumination on your theme: I’m not personally bothered by the term “Anthropocene,” simply because all these divisions are, to a point, imperfect teaching tools created by and for humans. Our divisions reflect a physical reality, of course – there really is a K-T boundary about 65 million years down through the rock, for example – but as you mention, they represent modern scientists building on and adapting the terms handed down to them from their predecessors, who did the same, back to the beginnings of science. 

Someone doing the whole thing over from scratch might make the major division the Great Oxygenation Event – or the Iron Rain, as I call it when teaching my daughter – when the seas and sky became saturated with oxygen. It would be about halfway through the Earth’s history, and it changed the planet in what, for us and most living things, are the most tangible ways – the seas and sky turned blue, the iron rained out of the sea, and most life was wiped out. Or before and after eukaryotic cells, or Hox genes, or land vertebrates, or any number of other game-changing developments. 

Our divisions tend to be biased towards what we can see, because we can see it, and biased toward animals rather than plants, because we’re animals; the spread of mammals also coincided with the spread of flowers, fruits and grasses, which changed the world more than mammals did, yet we think of the Age of Dinosaurs and the Age of Mammals. We divide eras or divisions into single-digit groups of three or seven, rather than thirty-three or five thousand and seven, partly because that’s what human brains can remember. 

I mentioned in a comment some weeks ago the difference between fact and truth; facts are data, but how we put them together reflects the truths we believe in. It doesn’t mean we’re not describing reality – we are, and can back it up with evidence. But we can describe the same reality in a number of different ways. 

In other words, it’s like the debate over whether Pluto is a planet – no one can deny that there are several large bodies and many small ones orbiting the sun, but the inner rocky planets are small, solid spheres, asteroids are smaller, solid potato-shapes, gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are stillborn stars, and Pluto and the comets are dirty snowballs with weird orbits. 

We group the four rocky spheres and the four gas giants together and call them “planets,” and possibly Pluto if we feel like it, but not the asteroids or comets. The planets and their orbits are proven facts; how we group them with our human language reflects our human truths. We group them into eight or nine partly because we remember that a lot more easily than the several million smaller bodies. 

We called Pluto a planet when we discovered it in the 1930s, partly because society believed in progress and wanted to celebrate new discoveries, partly because the growing power of the USA in the 1930s wanted to claim its own astronomical discoveries, and partly because Percival Lowell (whose initials, supposedly, were part of the reason it was called Pluto) had long predicted there would be another planet out there, and people thought Pluto was it. 

What I’m getting to here is, if referring to the current ecological disruption as an era helps us take it more seriously, call it an era – it is from our human perspective. It won’t be an era to God, who -- as Aquinas pointed out -- exists outside of time, but we can’t second-guess Him anyway.

 

Chatting with neighbours

When I lived in a regular American suburb, we would be surprised to see a tractor rolling up our driveway, but here it’s a normal thing. Today, it was our neighbour’s farmhand carrying a giant round hay bale for us, a gift from our neighbour.

My neighbour – we’ll call him Liam – has raised cows down the road for 75 years, and whenever I drive, jog or bicycle down the canal road, we stop and chat. I mentioned to him my daughter does archery, and uses bales as targets; he had bales that had sprouted grass and were no good anymore. Thus, we get a free archery target sitting in our driveway, and this week we’ll roll it to some suitable location behind the house.

Liam also passes on news about all our neighbours – not idle or intrusive gossip, but information you’re thankful to have. He tells me that his farmhand’s trailer was robbed recently; they suspect a few shady local kids rumoured to use drugs. Ireland has far less crime than the USA – one-fourth the number of homicides, for example – but we still have drugs and petty theft, and every area has its share of ne’er-do-wells and troubled souls.

The difference is that in more traditional communities, everyone knows who they are, and you can’t get away with much. It’s not that there’s no privacy – not like living in an internet culture, where people’s browsing history and bathroom photographs can be displayed for everyone to see. Rather, most people out here keep to themselves, and don’t nose into each other’s lives – but what you do in public matters. 

Everyone here knows the “boy racers” that drive too fast along narrow roads where children play, and some neighbours, I’m told, run to stretch spike-chains across the road when they hear the racers coming. Everyone knows to dogs are blind, and to slow down when they pass that stretch of road. If there's waste clogging up the canal or a bad smell coming from the mushroom factory, someone will complain; these things affect everyone, so everyone has a right to know.

Today I ran past my neighbour’s field --- we’ll call him Padraig – as he was picking his potatoes, and asked if he wanted help. He’s 86, and still sows and harvests his own crops by hand. He refused the help, but chatted amiably for a while.

Your potatoes look good, I said – ours got the blight.

“When did you plant them?” he asked.

I believe it was around St. Patrick’s Day, I said.

“You shouldn’t get the blight like that,” he said “We planted the same time, and we had a crop by July. Did you buy the seed?”

We chitted our potatoes, and then planted them from ones we bought, I said.

“Ah, those are bag potatoes,” he said. “Try certified seed next time, and if they don’t get the blight, use the eyes of those to make the next year’s crop. Do you have any sallies around?”

When I first got to Ireland, that sentence would have made no sense, but I knew he meant willow trees. Quite a few nearby, I said.

“You don’t want sallies too close to potatoes,” he said – “They encourage the blight. They attract the things from the air that cause the blight, and if potato fields are nearby, you’re more likely to get it.”

I haven’t looked into whether this has any scientific basis, but I like that people here carry that kind of local lore. We talked about the blackberries growing all along the hedgerows, distracting me from my morning jog, and he said they weren’t as tasty as last year’s, but were larger – he put it down to when the summer rains came. “That makes all the difference,” he said, and he might be right.

In fact, the hedgerows that line each field are positively sagging with berries of all kinds -- poisonous yew; lovely blackberries; the rose-hips that are so good for jam, and the sloes that grow on the blackthorn trees, so good for making into gin. We also see a profusion of haws on hawthorn trees and elderberries on the elders – the first is too bland to eat raw and the latter too tart, but both make a nice wine. Most years we’d be spending our spare time gathering them, but this year we’ve been busy with other things.

Right now, it’s merely cool and dry, a high wind is whistling across the bog, all our neighbours’ gardens swell with crops ready to be picked, and the leaves are changing rapidly. Everyone – people, animals, plants – seem to be in a hurry, doing their duty before the wheel turns and we plunge into the long and rainy darkness of the Irish winter.

Canute and the modern world

My 12-year-old knows about the most graphic scene in the film Alien, even though she’s never seen the film. She knows the accusations against Bill Cosby, even though she doesn’t know anything else about him. She has absorbed all kinds of sordid information about the world, even though she says she doesn’t want to know it, and doesn’t know how she acquired it. All this is from a child who lives in the Irish countryside, watches less television than most, is not allowed to use the internet unsupervised and who sees mostly black-and-white films with me.

I understand completely; most of us know things without knowing where we first heard them – where did you first learn about porcupines, for example, or Iceland? Our modern media – corporations, political factions and advertisers -- take advantage of that, flooding us with images and factoids and hoping some of it sticks. Generally, it works; we carry all kinds of attitudes and certainties about the world that we picked up from some screen, and that are now part of our world-view, even if some of it is false. We didn’t ask for the information, can’t verify it, and can’t explain how it came to be part of us. Such processes are out of our hands now.

If I asked you to picture Moscow, for example, or a Mexican village, or the Amazon rainforest, you’re probably picturing a set of images from the mass media – again, you picked them up somewhere, and now they pop into your thoughts unbidden when someone says the right word. When I picture Moscow, for example, I picture a snowbound Kremlin from a thousand international spy thrillers, and I bet the same is true of most Westerners. I’m not picturing pre-schools, or shopping malls, or trailer park barbecues on a hot summer day, even though all those, I’m told, are also part of Moscow.

I could correct my thinking about that drop of information, of course, but I can’t correct the entire flood of media influence that surrounds us. I could probably name a few Kardashians or tell you something about how Breaking Bad ended, just from passing magazines at the shop in the nearby village, or hearing the radio station over the loudspeakers in the parking lot. Look up your e-mail on a computer, and you get video advertisements, pop-ups, fake news and spam. Briefly glance at a television and you see adverts for products you don’t need, trailers that spoil the best parts of upcoming films, and graphic images you can’t un-see – and I see televisions now in pubs, restaurants, doctors’ offices and bus depots.

I’ve talked about how living in rural Ireland lets you see this in fast-forward, as the country has undergone about a century of change in a few decades. Our adult neighbours grew up here with small television screens and radio, and their parents grew up with local folk songs and storytellers. These days this country is hooked up to the same Hollywood media as most Western countries, and teens in villages here get the same memes, pop songs, and self-destructive fads as teens across the world.

All this swimming in self-referential loops of pop-culture flotsam makes actually enjoying any media far more difficult; any line or image dramatic enough to draw attention is repeated, discussed, spoiled, clipped out, placed on internet lists and regurgitated until it takes its place in the flood of cultural white noise. The film Alien would be one example; if my daughter sees it someday, the originality will be gone, and only the luridness will remain.

Another is the shower scene of Psycho; everyone I know has seen it many times in some form, but few people I know have seen the film itself. They never got to know the character of Marion Crane, or felt real emotion at her tragedy, or experienced the shock at this fundamental violation of the conventions of storytelling.

Many such pop-culture references these days mock the original work, so that anything original or sincerely moving gets parodied, made into memes and GIFs, and fed to the crowd-sourced online Spoofinator. The same goes for politics, or sexuality, or religion, or any of the subjects that modern culture treats with reflexive insouciance. Such idle jabs fill the airwaves, television dial and blogosphere, as political factions, religious groups and subcultures all try to buy our attention with the currency of petty insults.  

Let’s be clear: this knee-jerk irreverence is not satire, even if we call it that. Genuine satire works when the perceptive deflate our awe of the powerful, and when it works – as when Aristophanes satirised Athens’ brutal war to the very people who had lost brothers and sons – it is genuinely painful. In the case of our mass media, many of the people doing the jabbing are powerful themselves, and can pay for the most exposure and best put-downs.

When people from various religious and political bubbles snark at each other, they form a circular firing squad, tearing each other down from the anonymous safety of their computer screen; it’s cowardice, not activism. Nor does any of it carry the genuine catharsis of irreverence, for irreverence has no power when it’s all there is, when there’s no reverence left in our culture to push against.

The ubiquity of media means that Hollywood culture imposes its will on us whether we want it to or not, and we interpret real events according to fictional templates. Our movies, television programmes, even advertisements take the form of morality plays, whose characters tend to fall into basic types: Tough Cop, Unstable Scientist, Sexy Woman, Fanatical Preacher, Slick Executive, Smart-Aleck Kid, Bumbling Dad. Those characters, in turn, fill slots in the plot: Hero, Sassy Sidekick, Unnecessarily Evil Villain or Exaggerated Fool. Plots follow a set path on a certain timetable: the Set-Up, the Point of No Return, the Climax. At the end, most characters Learn a Valuable Lesson:  Follow Your Heart, or True Love Wins, or Break Free of Society’s Rules.

Some of us notice one or two of those messages only when they violate our subculture’s taboos: that is, when we find it sexist, or anti-Christian, or racist, or anti-American, or anti-whatever-we-favour. Then we consider it propaganda – and of course it is, but everything we see is propaganda. We merely notice it because it’s propaganda against things we favour, just as we complain about “media bias” when it’s a bias other than our own. Most of the propaganda we see every day, however, is invisible to us – we grew up with it, and are no more aware of it than we are the nitrogen wafting around us.  

But stories from 50 years ago, or 500 or 5,000 years ago, though, had different categories of people, and taught different lessons – say, Honour Your Oath, or Be Content with What You Have. They acknowledged that a few people held power, and all others serve them, while our culture pretends otherwise. They did not assume that they were the pinnacle of creation, or that the future would be richer than the past. They did not think of men and women as interchangeable. Look at stories by Sophocles or Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Frank Capra, and you see very different worlds, often with ideas that bristle our sensibilities, but also with wisdom that we have abandoned.

A reasonable approach might be to grow up learning from a variety of writers, from the old and new alike, and many people throughout history have done so. In all those eras, however, the stories came from a book, or actors on a stage, or neighbours. For us, they are a flood of images and stories in which we swim from childhood, and our images of the world – of who we are, how people should act, and what our future might be like -- are woven together from what we’ve seen on screens. They were made to be the most addictive and diverting sensory input ever seen, and they drown out everything else.

Which brings me to the most frustrating thing about the flood of Hollywood media around us: we didn’t give permission for this to happen. We don’t have the right or ability to turn it off, and as much as we try to withdraw from it, we can’t eliminate it and remain in the modern world. My daughter’s teacher gives her assignments that require the internet, I get talk radio broadcast on the bus, and I get television at the doctor’s office, filling my head with jingles, gossip, and images I didn’t want. As much as we claim to love our various freedoms, we have sacrificed the freedom not to know.

I don’t care very much if my daughter knows about a horror film or a celebrity scandal; those bits of information, in isolation, do no harm. I care about the constant avalanche of images and noise around us, and how it gets into our heads and shapes our passions without our consent. I care about how it creates a slow tectonic shift of culture under our feet, moving us to the positions most convenient for the people in power. I care about finding a way to raise children while trying to hold back this tide, standing like Canute against the sea.