Preface: recently, I have had quite a few of my regular readers ask whether I have any hope for humanity at all, given how much of my time a spend writing about our challenges, and I’d like to start to answer that question with an excerpt from an essay I wrote nearly 20 years ago following participation in a two-week archaeological dig of a Pre-Classic period Mayan ruin. My time in Guatemala had a profound impact on me and my understanding of my place in the world and would lead to the evolution of my understanding of hope that I will address in the Coda.
September 2004
These reflections start, oddly enough, with a Sunday school lesson. My formal relationship with the institutional church came to an end long ago, but I still attend with my mother when I am back visiting her in St. Louis out of a respect for–more than anything else–her role in my own spiritual journey. And since I was leaving the country from there so that my family could watch over my dog while I was away, fortune seemed to have it that I happened to sit in on her class the morning before my flight. They were discussing a passage from the tenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But the general ethos of that epistle was having a stronger influence than any given line of scripture on the conversation, and it was this that triggered what would end up being–as you will eventually see–an extremely pertinent memory for me.
But before sharing, it occurs to me that a brief aside is warranted for those in my audience not fully familiar with the New Testament in order to provide historical and cultural context. The church at Corinth was one of the strongest and most influential Paul helped found following his conversion, but it was also a church who’s members struggled greatly with the realities (and temptations) of the Greco-Roman society of which they were a part. Many of its members, claiming to lead godly inspired lives, were still engaging in the common social habits of their day (e.g. hopping down to the local pagan temple to “visit” the prostitutes [i.e. the “priests” and “priestesses”]), and Paul basically uses his first letter to the Corinthians (in truth, letters) to chew them out for not living lives in full accordance with their claims to be Christians.
Why Paul’s general tone here is so important to understanding what I remembered that morning is because discussing Corinthians reminded me of what the noted New Testament scholar, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor said in his biography of Paul. Murphy-O’Connor points out that Paul struggled all his life with the apparent discrepancy between the power of his own encounter with the Sacred and the apparent absence of this power in so very many of those who professed belief in Christ. His own experience on the road to Damascus had utterly and completely transformed (literally “converted”) him into a totally different person, one who had to live life differently than before because engaging the Sacred was now an integral part of who he was. Yet as he tried to bring this experience to others through his preaching and teaching, he kept crashing into the reality that so many who claimed to have encountered the Sacred did not live transformed lives. As I pointed out that morning in the class, what frustrated and angered Paul so much about the Corinthians (and why he chastises them so vehemently in his letters to them) was that here was one of his successful congregations and even they were still screwing up–living lives that showed little or no transformation, no “conversion,” of any kind. Paul just couldn’t get how anyone could have walked away from knowing the Sacred firsthand and not lived an authentic new existence as a direct cause–effect consequence, and it troubled him deeply to the day he died.
Recalling a scholar’s insights about St. Paul may seem as relevant to what follows as the Federal Reserve Board’s current economic policies are to the orbit of Mars, but I ask that you bear with me. Like an Amish barn raising, these ruminations need to construct some separate individual walls first before they can be assembled in unison to create a whole. We have wall “1.” Now wall “2.”
Part of the challenge I have found with sharing my journey in Guatemala with others–and probably a significant source of my hesitation to discuss it casually with those who ask–is that so much of the impact of those weeks involves a sort of “Gestalt” of a whole rather than easily described defining moments. Which might sound like the broad experience often referred to as “culture shock,” but that’s not what I’m talking about here. In my life I have already lived and worked for prolonged periods amidst poverty (which I can attest looks pretty much the same everywhere); so the deprivation and destitution I saw in the towns and villages was nothing new to me. With a psychological profile shared with less than 3% of humanity, I was already well versed in living on a daily basis feeling always vaguely alienated; I’m a “stranger in a strange land” in my own society, let alone someone else’s. I live on the East Coast; so overcrowding and the consequent denuding of environmental resources that accompany it didn’t seem any more pathetic and sad than it does here–hillsides and lakes stripped of their resources look, again, pretty much the same whether in Maryland or Guatemala (it is a little more painful in Guatemala because the original beauty of the jungle is so much greater than Maryland, but that’s about the only difference). Finally, even the language barrier didn’t tug particularly hard at my awareness. Having spent so much time on the Colorado Plateau, I am used to being immersed in the sounds of Spanish (even if I don’t always understand it). Thus, while I certainly experienced the frustration of the communication barrier at times, I never felt emotionally ill-at-ease because of it.
No, what made Guatemala so disturbing for me was in a very pivotal sense just how analogous and homologous it seemed. Certain elements of our society which I have always assumed were deeply cultural and, therefore, both unique and–more importantly–consequently malleable suddenly didn’t seem so unique, cultural, or–frighteningly–malleable. One particularly important aspect of American life, for example, that I have always taken for granted was simply an outgrowth of our distinctly rabid individualism is our rapacious conspicuous consumption of resources simply for the sake of consuming. I have seen our poor buy $200 status-symbol sneakers instead of adequately feeding their children. But I have always thought that was just us–that that was simply what the messages of our society taught everyone: whoever dies with the most, wins.
In Guatemala, however, I saw exactly the same thing–villagers owning cell phones with 11 unschooled children working to help pay for it; towns building elaborate arches over their main road to welcome visitors but leaving the coffee processing plant needed to employ people half-finished and vandalized. Suddenly, “us” and “our” was “they” and “them,” and I was left having to confront the frightening truth that rapacious consumption seems to be a trait of our species, not a trait of one of our cultures.
There were numerous other parallels that I found equally disturbing, but on one particular day toward the end of my stay, there was one specific event that brought a clarity to this “Gestalt” of “sameness” which I was experiencing that led to the realization that has so disconcerted me. We were returning from the dig site through the village mid-afternoon, and up ahead of us, we could see some children laughing and playing in the street, dragging some kind of what, at a distance, appeared to be wagon. The adults in the vicinity were looking on with expressions of content amusement, and it was clear everyone was enjoying the moment. My two fellow volunteers and I also started to smile and make appropriate comments when we realized as we got closer that the “wagon” was in fact a dead animal of some kind with a long rope attached to its neck.
That observation silenced us, but upon reaching the party of children, we saw that the animal, a cat, was in fact not fully dead. Instead, it was slowly being garroted by the tightening noose of rope as the children raced back and forth, dragging the cat behind them. We could see where the rope had cut through the bleeding animal’s fur and skin and was tearing at the underlying tissue, and it was clear from the weak, shuddering muscular spasms of the cat’s hind legs that the children had been “playing” with it for quite some time. The animal was clearly terminally damaged, but probably had several more minutes before it would finally decease. It was hard not to stare in horror at all the surrounding villagers–child and adult alike–but because we were in no position to intervene safely, we could only walk on by, leaving the animal to its fate.
The image of that cat twitching haunted me afterward for days. But what truly burdened me–and will do so until my own death–was the discernment that a species who condones torturing other organisms to death simply for its own pleasure is not long for this world. And before anyone starts to protest, remember that such lovely activities as boxing and bow-hunting are quite legal in the United States and our most popular sport is football. Even something as “innocent” as one of my state’s beloved traditions, the crab feast, involves the deliberate infliction of extreme pain (being steamed to death is probably second only to crucifixion as one of the most agonizing ways to go). It is a biological myth that these so-called lower organisms do not feel pain like we do. The capacity for pain is the second neural function to evolve in organisms with sensory input (for obvious advantageous survival reasons), and anything more sophisticated than a tapeworm feels it fully. The earthworm wriggles on the hook for the same reason you or I would wriggle if we found ourselves impaled with a metal rod through our bodies, and the power of that moment in Guatemala again came out of its “sameness.” Once more, I found myself forced to acknowledge that something dark and ugly was in fact a human trait, not merely some cultural attribute.
Now the darker side of human nature is hardly something new, nor at forty-one years of age can I claim any lack of familiarity with it, including my own (sadly, I have even witnessed the abuse of animals before; although, in those instances, I was in a cultural position to do something safely about it). So why, then, did this particular encounter with the darkness prove so troubling to me? To understand that, I must build the third “wall” of my “barn;” so I beg your patience with a brief biology lesson.
Most of us are familiar with the current population crisis facing our species, but what few who are not directly involved in the environmental sciences know is just how terrifying that crisis really is. The study of population dynamics is one of the more mathematical parts of biology, and the algorithms and equations used to describe what happens to populations of organisms over time are as deterministic as Newton’s laws of motion. If the model states “if p, then q” and condition “p” exists, then “q” will happen just as certainly as F=ma or E=mc2. The problem, of course, is that finding the absolutely correct equation given the myriad variables is impossible, and so for any given species and situation, there end up being ranges of models which share common features that are “tweaked” according to the available data.
Right now, the equations modelling the human population all agree that our species went past the Earth’s carrying capacity sometime between 1975 and 1982 (with some extreme models putting it +/– 3 years). What that means is that our species has grown so numerous that even if every last arable piece of land, etc. were put to nothing but only keeping individuals alive that there are literally not enough physical resources to sustain doing it. The key, of course, is “sustain” because what blinds most people to the problem is that simply keeping the existing humans alive temporarily is possible but only at the expense of permanently consuming resources that can not be replenished to keep the process going. As E.O. Wilson translates this fact into perspective in The Future of Life, we would have to have 4! more entire planet Earths to provide every human currently alive the basic standard of living we take for granted in this country.
The consequence of exceeding our carrying capacity, of course, is the same consquence as that of every other living organism: there is massive death and the population crashes back below the carrying capacity. There is not a population model in existence that does not agree on this elementary truth, and there is not an environmental scientist who does know that this truth is as deterministic as gravity. We are headed for an evolutionary bottleneck, and the human species will crash.
But here is where the possible range of models comes into play (and as you will see, why my reaction to Guatemala was what it was). Some, like Wilson, subscribe to what I will call the “optimistic” model. According to this model, within the next 200–500 years (5 to 10 generations; again depends on your starting variables), civilization as we know it will completely rupture apart; there will be massive pandemics, famines, and extinctions; and those humans that survive will be living in a world reminiscent of Western Europe in the year 600 C.E. Now, I want to emphasize that what this model describes is the optimistic outcome of the population equations. Just as the ancient Romans slid into barbarism, the entire species will slide into barbarism, and that is the BEST we can expect. At the other end of the range of models is what I will call the “pessimitic” one, that of Peter Ward and some of his colleagues, and according to this model, what lies at the end of the population crash is not barbarism but extinction. Humans simply will not be anymore. “Wall 3″ really could be a wall.
And that’s where my experience in Guatemala comes into the dialogue. I have known for many years that the adult lives of my students would be materially less well off than my own, and I have known that their own childrens’ lives will be harsher still, their grandchildrens’ still worse, and so forth. I have known that the rapacious material excesses of my own society will contribute to its own slow self-destruction and that we will take much of the ecology of the planet with us. I have known, as have all population dynamicists, that we are headed toward a population crash and that the effects of a crash on a social species will be distinctly unpleasant.
But I have always thought that the “optimistic” model of Wilson and others was right. That our capacity for rational self-determination would lead us to choose the kinds of difficult actions that could carry some survivors through the bottleneck. I have even been a teacher because of a hope that some wisdom will make it through the generations and better guide my students’ great-great-great-great grandchildren when they rebuild their world someday.
Now, however, I have no choice but to recognize that these models are probably wrong and that as a species, we simply will not be here in 500 years. The Mayans, themselves, rebuilt their society three times, only to overconsume, overpopulate, and crash each time, learning nothing from the time before. They could do so, though, because each time they crashed, they simply migrated to a new location (going from the Pacific side of the isthmus to the Atlantic side). This time, they have no where to go that someone else is not already there–none of us do–which is what made that conjunction of the utter “other-ness” of living Mayan culture with its equally powerful “sameness” I also experienced so jarring: it wasn’t that which made them uniquely Mayan that had destroyed themselves time and again; it was that which made them human that had destroyed them time and again.
And a species that kills for pleasure and consumes simply to consume will not survive a time when there is no where else to go. Guatemala has shown me where it has to end, and I am left very much wondering what meaning or purpose there is to my life.
The paradox–and my fourth “wall”–is that even as this knowledge and these thoughts churn away following my return home, I have gone back to school this fall full of renewed energy and drive to work as diligently as ever for a world that will never exist. I have already written three grant proposals for my summer research program, continued working to publish a lab manual with two of my students, and started writing letters of recommendation for my seniors. I have made repairs on the house, helped my dog heal from a bad bout with intestinal flu, and enjoyed dining out and a couple of good movies. In short, I have plunged into living as I have always done.
Of course, many might respond to that with “well, Duh! No one would actually live out such knowledge through their actions; if nothing else, the animal part alone would just keep living normally.” But I need to emphasize that I know we are doomed as a species in the same way a terminal cancer patient knows they are going to die. I have even in my private moments gone through the five classic stages of grieving. The last of which is acceptance, and therein perhaps lies the power of the paradox because it brings me back to where I started this tale: with Paul (and the “barn” gets raised).
The paradox of our species is that we evolved a brain capable not only of interpreting sensory data but of also having experiences that seem to transcend the empirical world. And what I find most fascinating is that whether one chooses to be a classic analytical scientific reductionist and argue from studies of Buddhist monk brain waves that the “Sacred” is simply a totally subjective state of mind or whether one chooses to be an ardent theologian arguing for the existence of God, the consquence of a transcendent encounter (whether you call it remapping the synapses or faith) remains the same: a life utterly transformed in its character.
I know; I have experienced it in my transcendent moments and know their power. And what I have had to come to accept in the past weeks is that who this encounter makes me is someone who fights for the “optimist” model of our future even while knowing the other model is most probably correct. One of my most fundamental values has always been the old proverb that it is better to light a candle against the darkness than to curse it. What I have learned from Guatemala is that I cannot NOT “light candles;” it simply isn’t in me. As Martin Luther said at his ecclesiastical trial: “Hier bleib Ich; Ich kann nicht anders.”
Which for me is the real power of Murphy-O’Connor’s insight I shared earlier. I have always known that you cannot cause another to have transformational experiences. No one can ever directly make someone else have this awareness, and the practical consequence of this basic reality is that all Paul’s evangelizing in the world was not going to cause the Corinthians (or anyone else) to be transformed (and I suspect Paul actually knew this). However, because he had known the transformation himself, he had to act as if others could be brought to it. He had to act as if the “Sacred” could be brought into people’s lives. He had to act as if others would someday live out this transformation in their own lives because he literally could not do otherwise as a consequence of his own transformation.
I have started to discover post-Guatemala that I, too, seem incapable of not living out of my own awareness of that which transcends. Because in spite of possessing the most grim factual knowledge of my life, I find that I literally can’t despair (partly because the utter rationalist in me knows that other factors can radically influence the models[1]). Like Paul, I find that I don’t have much choice but to live with the paradox of “as if,” and like him, I have to do so more than anything else because I simply cannot do otherwise and remain who I am.
Some days that is more comforting than others, and some days not. But I struggle with discovering acceptance in the face of ultimate mortality just as those who have come before me have, and perhaps like some of them, I will discover my paradox’s truth strong enough to get me through to the other side.
My mentor, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, Steven Schwarzschild once wrote that he and his brother often said that just because the world is coming to an end is no excuse not to get properly dressed for dinner; so ala Luther: Here I stand attired to dine; I can do no other.
[1] We might get lucky, for instance, and have an asteroid hit the planet soon, wiping out the majority of people and allowing us to co-evolve better with the rest of the planet–though it should be pretty sobering that mass destruction can be seen as a “hopeful” thing.
Coda
Anyone who has been following my posts this past month knows that I have found the journalist, Oliver Burkeman’s ideas about “time” truly revelatory, and he has made me much more conscious and self-aware about how I am using mine. However, there is one thing I think he gets wrong—or more accurately, misunderstands—and that is the concept of hope.
“Hope” to Burkeman is a passive thing. He thinks that to hope for something “means disavowing your own capacity to change things” (p. 231) and placing “your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment…to make things all right in the end” (p. 230). He is in complete agreement with environmentalist Derrick Jensen that “ ‘When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it’ ” (p. 231). Hence, for Burkeman, “to give up hope…is to reinhabit the power that you actually have” (p. 231).
Now, anyone who has been following my thoughts already knows that I think hope is a verb, that it means avowing your own capacity to change things and that when an individual hopes, they are already inhabiting their power to engage in the very work that needs doing. To hope is to do.
However, prior to Guatemala, I would have been sympathetic to Burkeman’s position. I tended then to think of hoping as a feeling, an emotional coping mechanism for dealing with despair. But as I returned to daily life in the classroom, knowing my very nature compelled me to “light candles” even in the face of overwhelming knowledge about my students’ futures, I began to realize that what makes light efficacious is that it actually dispels some darkness. Hoping for a better future meant actively dispelling some of what stood in the way of that, and thus, hope, for me, became a verb.
Yet before someone shouts “Semantics!” and argues that Burkeman and I are ultimately on the same page—people need to be actively doing things about today’s problems rather than passively praying that things will get better—I want to suggest that words and how we understand them matter, and I think Burkeman misunderstands. Here’s why: if you understand hope as I do, then the opposite of hope is not the despair it would be for Burkeman; it’s apathy. People who work to affect change have to have a sense of and belief in their own agency, and without it, what’s left is a sense of futility. Hope, I would argue, is our faith in that agency, and when I hope, I’m not just applying that agency, I’m actively believing in its power. Hence, to give up hope is to surrender your agency as an effector of change.
That’s what Guatemala ultimately taught me. I could be hopeless in the face of humanity’s most probable fate, giving in to indifference, caring only about the wants of me and mine. Or I could be hopeful, discovering as Diana Butler Bass reminds us that the opposite of despair is not hope but delight—delight in the changes I could and was affecting. Thus, if you ask me if I have any hope for humanity, my answer is that I have nothing but hope for humanity—and I’ll keep using my agency to do so as long as my share of 4000 weeks allows.
References
Bass, D. (July 12, 2022) Summer Wisdom Journey: Ecclesiastes—Delight and Despair. The Cottage. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/summer-wisdom-journey-ecclesiastes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailhttps://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/summer-wisdom-journey-ecclesiastes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Murphy-O’Connor, J. (1996) Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ward, P. (1994) The End of Evolution. New York: Bantam Books.
Wilson, E.O. (1992) The Diversity of Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Light a Candle 