RANT: I THINK THEREFORE I YAM.

 

Clever Hands

“Clever Hands, come here!”

Look how quick he is!

It’s as if he understands

what I’m saying.

He knows his name, though.

And he responds to simple commands.

Watch this:

“Clever Hands! Make fire.

Grow food.

Build cities.

Start wars.

Play God.

Take it all. 

Use it up.

Now, throw it away.”

See what I mean?

 

 

 

I RECENTLY READ AN SCIFI SHORT STORY by Gordon K. Dickson, written in 1964, called “Dolphin’s Way”  It was set on a small island off the coast of Venezuela, where the story’s main character, Malcom Sinclair, works with dolphins at a small scientific research station. His goal is to establish an understandable language with the marine mammals, and so allow humans and dolphins to truly communicate. Years of trial and error, and experiment have proven fruitless, yet Malcom clings to the belief that the wild dolphins who come to stay at the centre’s open-sea pens want to communicate with him. Despite all his failures, he feels he is close to a breakthrough. But he is also convinced that his bête noir, Corwin Brayt, the centre’s new administrator, is about to pull the plug on funding for his project. His work with “Castor” and “Pollux”, the latest pair of wild dolphins to visit the island centre, will have to end soon if he does not produce results from his experiments.*

One morning he is paid a visit from a writer with the science magazine Background Monthly, one Jane Wilson, an almost preternaturally beautiful woman, to whom Malcom is immediately attracted.  She tells him she has been aware of his research for some time which surprises him, given that his project is small and hardly mainstream. He is intrigued and flattered by her attention, but a little puzzled by her lack of knowledge concerning the foundation that funds his project and the organization he works for. She knows about him and the work being done at Dolphin’s Way Island but does not seem to have the background information one would assume a reporter for a science magazine would have going into an interview.

Saucer landing from The Day the Earth Stood Still

At the pool, where Malcom has been listening to the dolphin’s underwater communication sounds through headphones, she asks about his work and what he hopes to achieve. She mentions she is aware he has another “theory”, one concerning communication with alien beings from other worlds. Somewhat abashed, he tells her he believes there are more advanced civilizations in the galaxy who monitor less-advanced worlds, including Earth, waiting for signs the inhabitants have reached a level of sophistication to make them eligible to join their galactic ranks. Malcom suggests the “test” or 'entrance exam' for admittance to the cosmic club might not be related to any technological advances that humans have achieved, but rather it may be sociological, “like learning to communicate with an alien culture—a culture like that of the dolphins.” (567) Jane communicates interest in his theory as they observe the dolphins swimming in complex circuits around the pool. 

Later, they discuss his work over lunch, with Jane expressing enthusiasm about the possibilities of his research bearing fruit. He, himself, is less optimistic about a break-through, not least because he expects the project will shortly be defunded by Brayt. But, he goes on to express to Jane how convinced he is of the intelligence of dolphins and how close he is to discovering a language both species can share and communicate with, if only he can overcome what he and his fellow researchers call the “environmental barrier.”

 

Klaatu and Gort

That afternoon, he makes a final effort, donning goggles and flippers, and enters the pool to swim with the dolphins. He comes to realize that dolphins communicate through more than just their vocal “clicks” and high-pitched calls, but also through touch and swimming patterns. There in the water, he senses the beginnings of an actual communication with the sea creatures. Emerging from the pool he meets Jane and the two watch the dolphins swim in their graceful arcs and dives. She listens as Malcom exclaims it’s only a matter of time until the complex auditory, visual, and tactile elements of dolphin speech are analyzed and synthesized into a coherent “language” that both humans and dolphins can use and understand. True communication with another species will shortly be achieved, he says! He is elated, and confident that any alien race observing Earth will see that humanity is now worthy to join the larger galactic community. Jane confirms he has indeed established a rudimentary communication with dolphins and that his speculations concerning galactic observers are correct, for she is one. The only problem, she says—and here her words convey a genuine expression of pity—it is the dolphins who have passed the test. 

Lawrence Olivier as Hamlet

POOR MALCOLM! He’s suffering, like great swaths of our species, from a bad case of anthropolatritis. Okay. I made that up. “Anthropolatry” is the word in question, and it means: “The worship of a human as a divine being; the inappropriate or idolatrous elevation of a person to the status of a god.”  (finedictionary) And it causes the kind of dis-ease that leaves us moderns itchy and bothered, and vaguely dissatisfied all our lives. What will we do if humanity isn’t the centre of the universe? That we aren’t on an escalator to the stars?!? How can we cope with such a cosmic bummer? We’re angel material, after all; we're not made from the same stuff as the rest of the rabble. Doesn’t Shakespeare’s Hamlet say as much when he utters the immortal words:

“What a piece of work is Man!
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties!
In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world.
The paragon of animals…..” (II, ii, 303-07)

 

THOUGH TO BE FAIR the ever-confused Hamlet does go on a bit later, more humbly, with a soliloquy that begins with the equally immortal words: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" (II, ii, 550) So there’s that. Point being, after centuries of elevating ourselves by dint of our big, rational brains and faith in the inevitability of human progress—kind of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, in other words—we find (or shortly will find) that there’s only thin air between the soles of our boots and the ground, and walking around elevated in such a fashion might actually be a foolish idea, and one that will prove hazardous to our health. 

Or not. Maybe there is an alien race watching us waiting, with cosmic patience, for signs that we’ve ready to join the big leagues. But, like Malcom swimming with his dolphins, I won’t be holding my breath for long. 

 

IN HIS RECENT ESSAY, “The Last Years of Progress”, John Michael Greer returns to the topic that informs much of his writing—our misguided belief in progress:

 

“Thus the concept that needs to find a place in the imagination of our time is that instead of living on the brink of Tomorrowland or the brink of apocalypse**, we are living in the last years of progress, well into the opening phases of the era I’ve called the Long Descent. The future that crouches in front of us, preparing to spring, has nothing to do with the paired fantasies of progress and apocalypse and everything to do with the long, slow, uneven decline that has filled the twilight of every other civilization.”

YEARS AGO, I was captivated as a teenager watching the Apollo Eleven moon landing in 1969. I clipped newspaper reports and magazine articles about anything and everything concerning the moon mission and our future in space. The scrapbooks are long-gone, of course, but I imagine them sitting in an attic somewhere, yellowed and crumbling and dried up like the Star Trek future most of us envisioned back then. That future is now, by the way. (“Where’s my jet-car, Jetson?!?”)

But, you say, Elon Musk is going to Mars! He said he was. (Maybe--if he can get governments to partner with him fork over the money.) But I hope he doesn’t make it to the Red Planet with his crew of starship troopers. Because they will die there. (One fly in the ointment is all that hard radiation blasted by the sun into space and onto Mars. Just sayin’.)

 

I WON’T BANG ON TOO LONG other than to repeat that our daydreams about flying saucers with aliens aboard who will either save us or destroy us; our visions of technological nirvanas or post-apocalyptic hellscapes are all wishcastings of an adolescent species. But, we will grow up eventually and learn our lessons, even if the learning ahead may prove harder than it needs to be. And someday, we will be able to say, like that sage sailor once said: “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam!” And that won’t be so bad, after all.

 

Cheers, Jake

_____________________________

 

 

 

*Castor and Pollux are also known as the “Twins”. In Greek mythology they are called the “Dioscuri” (“sons of Zeus) “The Dioscuri were regarded as helpers of humankind and held to be patrons of travellers and of sailors in particular.” (Wikipedia) One was mortal, the other immortal. Eventually, both became immortal when Zeus raised them up to the stars to become the Gemini constellation in the night sky.    

 

**In his essay, JMG reminds us that misplaced visions of “Mad Max” doomscapes are the mirror image of techno-future paradise. Both are extreme predictions of futures that are not borne out by any comparable rise or fall of civilizations in the historical record. Also, apocalyptic predictions, when they fail to materialize by the date predicted, conveniently act to persuade techno-futurists that their vision of the future remains robust and real. JMG's latest essay has a deft rebuttal to that proposition.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux 

http://www.finedictionary.com/anthropolatry.html

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. G. B. Evans. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.