Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Samanthasaurus Rex
This week I discovered that I am going extinct. Leon Wieseltier ("Among the Disrupted") confirmed what I've suspected for a long time (like, at least since the iPhone 6 came out and, once again, I didn't give a hoot): My generation was the long tail of western European liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment, all of which have been rendered irrelevant, no dir, by the DIR (the Digital Information Revolution). We are officially relics.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
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