Getting your hands dirty

... or, the Monday harbinger of doom (two days late), a bit of mulling on themes themselves and a theme always present, and one more book on the booklist, all in one post.

Reading David Brin's comment on Jared Diamond's Collapse this week—a work in the same area as Wright's A Short History of Progress, in the wake of swearing at someone (apologies, again, Holly) for having the very nerve to ask about the theme in a certain manuscript that's sat too long on my conscience, I'm struck by one of those odd confluences of ideas.

Yeah, I keep finding myself reading Brin. Still not quite sure what to make of the man's books. But there's no knocking he's got ideas, some of them pretty good ones.

I'm sympathetic to Brin's general notion, espoused in the piece on Diamond's work, that if we're going to find solutions that allow our civilization somehow to dig itself out of the hole it's apparently been digging itself into of late, that the solution probably isn't going to be anything so obvious as a simple rejection of technology, a naive return to some simpler agrarian past. Rather, probably, it's going to be things that come out of our understanding, that fuse the remarkable things we can now do with that technology to the wisdom to apply it sensibly.

Yes, as critics of such views note, technological advances always have side effects, some of them awfully unpleasant. And yes, our technologies have allowed us to dig the hole so much deeper, so much more quickly this time.

But this doesn't, I still feel, preclude our doing what we've always done, in response to this crisis: coming up with a solution which is also, in a way, a step forward, rather than a step back.

This, I know, is probably as much preconception as insight on my part. It's just an attitude of mine, bred in the bone, that if you're a human being, the way you solve things is, at least in part, by thinking about them until you understand them better, and from that, usually, follows a solution which isn't, entirely, one you've seen before, even if it uses elements of past solutions.

It's also, however, an intuition based on, I think, some understanding of the social behaviour of our species. And that understanding leads me to suspect that one of the reasons you can't just return to some simpler past is, well, people won't. Possibly, they can't.

Or, as one great thinker put it: How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Gay Paree?

Simply put: we probably can't just tell the world, after they've built technical civilizations that sent a robot probe to the surface of Titan, oh, go home, break out the plows, leave your car to rust, throw away the chemical fertilizer, start yourself a nice little organic subsistence farm. Weed by hand. That's it. That's all. Good luck.

People won't do that, I'm afraid. Not enough of them. Not unless they absolutely have to. And having to, I think, we'd only get to after a particularly ugly collapse... a collapse which could, I should note, easily do enough damage to the carrying capacity of ecosystems that there might be bloody few places left that could actually support a subsistence farm fertile enough to feed a family.

But they might do something almost as drastic, and about as effective, if they see it as a way forward, if we see it as an innovation, a way for us to do something new, something wiser, something we feel makes a real and innovative use of what we've learned, of late.

As to that preconception, that just ignoring where learning leads isn't much of an option anyway, it's attached to one of the themes that creeps into a lot of what I do. It's not just the notion that you don't get to ignore learning—it's the notion that you can't, really, choose not to learn. Partly, I come to this conclusion because movements and institutions hostile to research into the natural world have generally been such miserably nasty things. Partly, it's an empirical thing: I think it's a pretty safe observation that, whether you like it or not, nature will deal out her lesson. You can go to her and learn the easy way now, or she'll bring it to you later, the hard way.

And, Holly, if you should happen to read this, that is one of the themes that works its way into Will... a theme I see as rather connected to the larger principle Will has to face up to: the notion that he's going to have be become engaged with the world (or worlds) he inhabits whether he likes it or not. And though Will really isn't (I promise you) much of a book of speeches, the characters do get somewhat explicitly into this, as an obvious consequence of what they're trying to do, and it does lead to one of the few signature lines in the thing I really like, and probably the best summary of the whole thing that exists anywhere in the book:

...yes, there is danger in learning. But ignorance isn't innocence. Nor are either necessarily virtues. And in the end, they aren't even options. Learning comes, however you choose to flee it. And any gardener can tell you: life is all about getting your hands dirty.

— Hwishje, from Will and the Tower of the Haithedim

And, as to theme, that last line, that really is the crux of it, the way I see it, right there. That's what Will learns, among other things. You wanna live, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty. That can mean a lot of things. That can mean loving someone. That can mean hurting people. That can mean (with particular reference to the plot of Will, again) seeking learning, even when it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do, for all sorts of reasons. That can mean seeking the answers to mysteries, even knowing the answers are probably going to scare the hell out of you.

Anyway. Guess I'm adding Diamond to the booklist.