By now, you undoubtedly know about the devastating earthquake in Nepal. You may not have heard, however, about the earthquake in SW Michigan. Earthquakes come in all sizes, from the huge and deadly to the minor shake-ups. Michigan’s earthquake was a minor shake-up. When I was growing up in California, we had numerous minor quakes. Even though they always came as a surprise, we learned to recognize them for what they were. After I had grown up and left, California experienced at least two serious quakes with extensive damage and some deaths, one in northern California and one in southern California.
Earthquakes, as is also true of other “natural disasters,” such as tornados and floods, demonstrate how little control humans actually have over the course of events. In every human mythology I’m aware of, God (whose nature varies from mythology to mythology) puts Man (and almost always its the male of the species) in charge of everything on Earth. Most people (especially those who know a little about science) recognize that life existed on Earth before the arrival of humans and that modern humans are the result of a process of evolution. Early humans, and our not-so-distant relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans organized in tribes to be better able to compete for survival. In addition to competing with other animals—many of whom were bigger, stronger, and faster than humans—different tribes also had to compete with other tribes of humans. As the poet Tennyson said, Nature is red in tooth and claw. Humans are no exception.
The two principal methods of competing between and among tribes were elimination and assimilation. I am not sure when the idea of negotiation was developed, but my sense is that it developed when assimilation wasn’t possible and the costs of elimination were too high. In more recent history, think about the way Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan went about establishing their empires. I have always found it interesting at how little differences in philosophy can result in major wars. One of the best examples is the way two Christian sects, Protestants and Roman Catholics, were at war with each other for so many decades. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift used the metaphor of beliefs about the right way to open soft-boiled eggs as the big-enders and little-enders a reason to go to war. And currently, the two main branches of Islam, Shia and Sunni are basically at war to see whose beliefs will endure.
While humans are busy competing (often red in tooth and claw) to see which end of the egg should be opened first, our planet goes on about its business of moving geological plates around and spouting off with volcanic activity. Geological activity, including earthquakes, should make us realize the truth expressed in the old Chiffon Margarine commercial about the hazards of attempting to fool Mother Nature. Just when we (humans) think we have something figured out, we discover that we were missing a critical piece of information. The drought in Western United States and global climate change are perhaps the best current examples of that.
Nature rules. It’s up to us to adapt. When we attempt to fool Mother Nature, we typically discover that we have only fooled ourselves. My guess is that we will discover that our efforts to produce crops that resist insects and weed infestations through genetic modification (GMOs), will ultimately fail. The weeds are doing a pretty good job of adapting to the chemicals, but bees, butterflies, birds, and bats are slower to adapt. If you are old enough, you can remember driving across country and having to stop to clean your windshield from time to time because the accumulation of dead insects would obscure your vision. That’s no longer the case. I suspect that “Mother Nature” has a vested interest in life without having any particular vested interest in the type of life. If all the birds and bees die, that will greatly influence human life, but Nature will simply start over again with whatever kind of life will thrive on planet Earth.
It is up to us (humans) to adapt as best we can, even while we recognize that whatever advantages our adaptations provide, they also have disadvantages. This is true of technological change as well. It hasn’t been that many generations ago, for example, that people traveled by foot, horseback, or horse-drawn (or mule-drawn) wagons. Automobiles, trains, and airplanes are relatively recent inventions. The rate of change in technology has been accelerating. It took a very long time, for example, for sailing vessels to be replaced by “steamships” and for horses and buggies to be replaced by automobiles. In my own lifetime, I have gone from automobiles with “stick shifts” and no seatbelts to those with built-in GPS systems, and back-up cameras. When I was growing up, my family subscribed to a daily newspaper and to a variety of weekly and monthly print publications. In those days, I got very little news from TV or radio, and there was no Internet. These days, I get my news from the Internet and TV, and print-based publications have all but disappeared.
Such changes are metaphorical earthquakes, even if they happen slowly enough that we recognize them as such only in retrospect. The Amish aside, transportation will never return to horses and buggies. The same is true for communication technology. I learned to keyboard in a typing class in high school. The typewriters were all manual. Corrections were next-to-impossible. If you wanted copies, you used carbon paper. For most of my childhood, my family had one phone. It was black with a rotary dial and on a “party line.” Long-distance calls were rare and expensive. To communicate at a distance, we would write letters, put them in stamped envelopes, and have the Post Office deliver them—days, or perhaps weeks, later depending on the distance. Although they didn’t happen as quickly as earthquakes or tornados, changes in technology have changed our “landscape” dramatically. The “science fiction” of video-based communication has become our current reality. We are living in a slow-motion earthquake.
When you are close to the trees, you can’t see the forest. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that computer-based technologies have changed life for virtually everyone, regardless of the degree to which they use the technologies themselves. Electronic technologies have also radically changed the nature of mass communication, especially radio and television. We are currently in the process of reconstructing our civilization in the wake of rapid changes on a variety of fronts. The degree to which Aldous Huxley’s metaphor of a Brave New World will prove prophetic remains to be seen.
