Troubled times. Turning times.
I saw one of those "time-lapse" depictions of human history, recently.
It depicted the whole globe, as if from space, with lights blinking on
to depict the rise of cities. Until rather recently, cities, almost entirely,
first show up more-or-less in temperate zones, like a belt around the earth.
For a long time, cities clustered there where we are fighting wars today.
The Tigris/Euphrates river system was especially active. From Northern Africa (think of the Nile River system, and up across what is now Syria and Iraq, to Iran (think of Babylon, and Assyria, and Persia), and even to India, cities were founded, like obvious evidence that we were no more hunters and gatherers.
The tension between Christianity and Islam is not that old, but it originates in the same belt of cities, and it has been active for centuries. The family squabbles among Jews and Christians and Mohammedans spilled from the Mid-East over Africa, Europe, and into Asia. There is, in spite of our earnest wishes that it were not so, something parochially religious about our disputes today. And it is not that the flag bearers of truth and the despised tatters of heresy are easily separated. Everybody thinks his own clan and tribe and nation and religion and sacred soil is pure, and that the "others" are wrong. The charges fly like grenades and rockets.
There is something insane about people armed with howitzers and lightning fast aircraft and bombs fighting with each other about whether their own, long-since-dead prophets and prayers should prevail.
The human species was spreading across the globe, and as we succeeded, we built cities as a consequence of the fact that we were trading hunting and gathering for agriculture, living in cities mostly where the great river-valleys were. But we were still tribal, clannish, and passionately committed to our own primitive convictions. It is still so.
It is still so, but
we are growing beyond city-states
because we cannot avoid
the whole earth.
Our mindless arguments about trade, for instance, and whether it is good or bad for us, is something like arguing whether it is a good or bad thing to have neighbors. We cannot all move to the Panhandle of Idaho, or to the frozen wilderness of Alaska: a few can. Most of us have to come to terms with the whole earth, and that we are everywhere on it.
And we are no longer simply an agricultural human race, building cities. We are no longer urban dwellers working in monster steel mills and coal mines, and auto factories. The steel is being produced without horsepower and with darned little human muscle power. There are sophisticated machines doing the work. Not only have many of the steel mills, now made small, moved to other places, but even when they haven't, they will never be the way they used to be.
The questions are not how to get more coal out of the ground and into Pittsburgh, and how to get the oil from South Dakota and Saudi Arabia across our aquafers, but what to do with all the people who used to work in those mills and factories, and how to reshape our politics and government to make our new realities work best for most of us, not just the lucky few who are cashing in.
The answers are not in those agricultural cities, in those industrial cities. The answers are in how to adapt to the fact that whoever we are, almost wherever we are on earth, we have to deal with each other, and to make the best possible deals with each other.
We cannot make America (or anywhere else) great again in the ways it used to be great because that world is gone. That world, in its disintegration and transformation, has made a few people incredibly wealthy, and a lot of people not just anxious, but angry, and afraid of what seems inevitable if nothing new happens. Thus, the angry right wing. Thus, the insistence of the left wing that the fundamental economic and political structures have to change.
We are living, not only among the stones, and on the old streets of those first great cities that happened as a consequence of the birth of agriculture and industry, but carrying their ideas and values, as well. It is time to recognize that this is a much later time and place and space.
But what do we do?
We lament what is gone.
We want to go back.
We cannot go back.
We have to change how we think,
and what we do.
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