by buzzard » Thu 03 Jul 2008, 15:14:46
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mmasters', '
')So what strong opinions did you once have that have turned out to be REALLY wrong?
Your timing is exquisite.
Yesterday, my wife said to me,"You speak as if from unquestioned authority, as if your opinions are cast in stone. How can you be so sure that you are right?"
My answer to her was to give her a very telling example of how not only how a person's opinion can change over time but how one's whole sense of reality can evolve.
As I was growing up as a child and on into my early adult years I was curious about the world and grasped onto the "scientific" mind-set as the paradigm which would guide me to all truth and knowledge. I naturally became a "techie" in the sense that I strongly believed that mankind (this was in the days before "humankind") was destined for the stars. We would at some point in our evolution of progress leave behind this planetary womb and colonize new planets and eventually conquer the galaxy with our wonderful inventions and gadgets. I read science fiction since the days of "Astounding Stories." Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Farmer. I considered these visionary giants.
Through the years something insidious began happening. Not any one thing, of course. Part of what happened to me can be simply explained by experience. I also began to realize that not everyone saw the world like I did. I also had been juxtaposed with my position of scientific techie a position of fundamentalist christian. I became quite interested in what I called Biblical Archeaology. My facination with the past grew until I found myself sloughing off christianity like an old skin. However, in the process an uneasy feeling planted itself within me that something dreadful had happened about ten thousand years ago which has put humanity on a dangerous road.
I carried that implanted feeling with me for many years as I tried to reconcile all of the various contradictions which I saw around me. If we were so wonderfully evolving why have we not changed from our murdering, enslaving, greedily grasping past? If our technology and industry has progressed so far, why are more people starving today than ever?
Then I read a quotation by a famous Astronomer and Mathematician, " It has often been said that if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high grade metallic ores gone, no species however competant can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and on chance only. ( Fred Hoyle, 1964)
That statement jolted me. " If we fail..." I looked around and as far as I could see we, as a species didn't seem to be exactly on track to make the stars our personal empire. In fact, what we were busily doing was ensure that this would not take place. What had gone wrong? Where had we humans taken the wrong fork in the road? I thought back to that ten thousand year old event. What event? The obvious change that took place was the advent of agriculture. Could it have been agriculture? Possibly. But why? And more importantly, what could that seemingly progressive and innocent innovation have done to us to bring us to the precarious position in which we found ourselves?
I have since discovered that others have explored this same question and have gone on to provide some at least tentative answers. Zerzan, Quinn, Jensen.
In 2001 while researching events surrounding 9/11 I ran across a site called, "Wolf At The Door" owned by a guy in the UK. Suddenly I was confronted with the concept of limits. Strangely enough I had never really considered that we could not continue to base an infinite growth paradigm on the finite resources of this planet. But, isn't that what was implied by Hoyle's critique of technological civilization? " a one shot affair..." It didn't take me long to realize that we were taking our shot right now... and failing.
The biggest change in opinion for me is that I began as a science techie with his head in the stars to a died-in-the-wool primitivist with his feet planted firmly on his land base. Of course many other things can be spun off from this. But, 180 degrees is a fairly major turn around.