Solstice 2007
The sunrise of 1945
©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
12/20/07
Back around mid 1945, the world changed. World War II had ended, Europe and Japan were desolate ruins, and the rest of the world was still in shock and horror at the atrocities they found in the death camps of eastern Europe and Germany.
“Never again” became a mantra, not only of the Jews who survived the Holocaust, but of all decent people who looked at the incredible destruction and gaped at the horror of the nuclear explosions over Japan.
For a brief time, it looked like the changes would be profound and far reaching. Humanity may have learned something from the horror of the war. The UN was founded. The Marshall Plan fed Europe, saving millions.
The allies treated the people of the defeated countries with respect and decency, and it paid off with peaceful, friendly allies where there had been mortal enemies.
62 years on, it’s clear that while the war DID bring about a change in human affairs, but it wasn’t as comprehensive and far reaching as the shocked idealists of 1945 had hoped.
Nineteen forty-six was a rough time to be a science fiction writer with a cynical take on the world, but Robert Heinlein was willing to give it a go. He surmised, correctly, that the mushroom clouds would dominate our consciousness for many years to come, and he hated and feared Stalin and all that Stalin stood for. In this light, he wrote a short story in which a writer was hanging out in a bar one afternoon. They were discussing foreign affairs, and suddenly there was a bulletin on the radio announcing that the Soviet Union had just test-fired a nuclear bomb. The writer immediately tossed all his money on the bar, fled to his car and took off for the hills. The bar tender laughed at the paranoia of the patron, and cast an amused glance in the direction the writer ran off in – just in time to have his eyes fried by an atomic blast.
People laughed at Heinlein at the time. Everyone knew that the atomic bomb was so complex that only six men in the world understood how it worked, and the Russians wouldn’t possibly be able to build one before about 2000, by which time America might have dozens of the bombs. Later people laughed at the story because of Heinlein’s assumption that the instant Stalin got his hands on a bomb he would launch it at America. Of course, a lot of these same people believe that the instant Iran gets a nuclear bomb they would launch it at America, regardless of the fact that America has 12,000 such weapons and would promptly turn Iran in to a black sea of rapidly boiling radioactive glass if they pulled such a stunt. So don’t laugh too loudly at Heinlein; his scenario, silly as it seems now, was a lot more plausible at the time than the one the hysteroids of the neo-con movement are promoting now.
We DID learn, somewhat. We’ve managed not to have an atomic war. We’ve had plenty of genocides and mass slaughters, especially in the third world, but nothing like the cold, impersonal mass murder of the Holocaust.
It’s human nature that all societal beliefs spawn antithetical beliefs, but the Holocaust deniers are still widely regarded as bitter, ignorant, and malevolent kooks, and rightly so. The Holocaust remains ingrained in our consciousness, the supreme example of what callousness and indifference can achieve.
In the middle of the twentieth century, humanity gazed into Nietzsche’s abyss, the abyss gazed back, and we avoided falling.
Instead, we teeter along the edge of that abyss, waving our arms frantically to keep balance and stopping to take deep slugs of 120 proof madness. And yet, we don’t fall. Pakistan, a nuclear power, is in chaos, and even if nukes don’t fall into the hands of wild-eyed religious fanatics, India is watching the situation carefully and at least considering a preemptive strike. Iraq and Afghanistan grind on, abattoirs for the edification of politicians with phony fear-mongering supporting equally phony causes.
One of the more startling examples of humanity’s dance with the abyss came in the form of a news story about a new breed of mouse that geneticists at Case Western University in Cleveland had inadvertently created; a super mouse, one that was faster, stronger, more durable and able to outbreed normal mice, and they did this by simply changing one gene that affects metabolism. My first thought was that with the existing rodent problem, the last thing humanity needed was a better mouse. But as I read on, I realized that the same simple genetic modification could be made to human embryos, and could result in humans that were stronger, more durable, and faster.
Who wouldn’t want children who were superior? It’s easy to infer that such children would be generally healthier, as well. What parent wouldn’t want that?
Of course, with genetic modification, there is always an element of the Monkey’s Paw, a frisşon of “be careful what you ask for”. The same genetic modification could result in traits that cannot be measured by making a mouse run on a conveyer belt, such as lower intelligence, or lower empathy, or diminished sense of smell.
Genetic modification is a moral and ethical conundrum that utterly dwarfs the public preoccupation with relatively simple and straightforward things such as abortion and birth control. Breeding for healthier children is fine, but what if a group wants to “cure” homosexuality? Or other races? Or left-handedness? Suppose a gene is found that governs religiosity, and children without such a gene are happy, well-adjusted atheists complete with moral codes and behavioral standards?
The changes can be subtle and yet profound. Scientists discovered that the virus pandemic among cats, toxoplasmosis, can spread to both mice and humans through contact with a cat’s feces (dust from a litter box, say). It usually doesn’t harm them, but it causes one physio-psychological change; it makes the smell of cat urine attractive to the affected animal. With rats and mice, this means a more readily available food supply for cats. With humans, it may explain that well-known phenomenon, “the crazy cat lady”.
Welcome to the abyss. Dance, and drink deeply.
But humans are adaptable, and even if we do marvelously at making life difficult for ourselves, we do at least notice this failing, and try to address it. We’ve gone 62 years without a nuclear war, a fact which would have astonished and delighted the Heinlein of 1946. We are slowly and belatedly beginning to stir on global warming and over-consumption, and more and more of the world recognizes that the biggest single problem humanity has is the sheer numbers of people in the world.
I frequently run into people who tell me that things just keep getting worse and worse. For most people living in America since 1980, that has certainly been true, but that is local, and it is ephemeral.
History isn’t a cycle so much as it is a recurring motif, and it doesn’t inevitably descend into chaos, but rather bobs up and down, sometimes learning the evil of chaos, sometimes forgetting, but always bobbing back up. Dancing on the edge of the abyss.
I trust humanity to endure. It’s a good bet, even if because it is a bet that I cannot lose. Go ahead. Bet me we’ll all die in ten years. Good luck collecting. In the meantime, I expect that in ten years, humanity will still be here. And ten years after that. And after that.
If history was, as pessimists tell us, a downward spiral, than human history would have ended at the gates of Auschwitz, and in 1946 we would have had no cause to rebuild because there would no longer be anything left of our humanity to strive for.
But we pulled ourselves up from the lowest depths, and learned. Despite ourselves, we will prevail.
/“We do it right
Sometimes
We shine the light
Sometimes
We find the fish beneath the ice
Sometimes.”/
– Inuit hunting song
Happy Solstice.
Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.