The Decline and Fall of Every Man's Empire

Yesterday, I watched a lone wolf separate a caribou fawn from its mother and then chase it through miles of subarctic tundra until the fawn finally made a mistake, losing its footing in the rough terrain. It slowed down just enough that the wolf could catch its tuft of a tail in his jaws and pull. The fawn collapsed seeming too enervated to even struggle. As you might imagine I felt dismay and a bit of terror grip me as the wolf, also tired from the chase, caught its prey and made a couple of lazy but decisive bites into the neck and back of the fawn. I was reminded briefly how cruel and harsh nature can be, but once the Planet Earth editors thought we had seen enough, I was left with a choice: to push the unpleasant scene from my mind or ponder its significance.

I think it is hard for us to deal with the death of large mammals. Perhaps we are more squeamish than most societies. Perhaps we are more refined. Perhaps too few of us have ever looked an animal in the face before we have eaten it, or participated in the process that brings it to our table. Perhaps we too often anthropomorphize animals so that we can see our sappy selves reflected in more of nature. Perhaps we have been so domesticated by our plush surroundings that we feel safer if we can domesticate all of nature, if only in our minds.

In another scene a mother polar bear leads her two hungry cubs out toward the sea after emerging from hibernation so she can get them some food. This means she will have to stalk and kill some seals, but we root for the hunter this time, because we are as disturbed by the starvation of the hunter as we are by the death of the hunted.

The problem, then, isn’t that we care more about prey than predators, but that we have a hard time dealing with the death of able-bodied creatures, especially if it looks painful. We are much more comfortable with long, slow death from old age. Partially, this is because we know that the old have had a fair chance to enjoy life already, but mostly it is because the old seem inured to pain and psychologically prepared for death. Their slow decline has put them in a state close to death, so death isn’t such a shock. We epitomize this haunting Emily Dickinson poem.

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

The poem seems to start out hopefully. We start out seeking new experiences and taking risks in pursuit of pleasure. However, this inevitably causes some pain and soon we abandon our optimism and zeal for self-awareness, slowly giving up on life. By the end of the poem death seems like the next logical step, rather than an abrupt change.

Too often we are dead before we die. In a physical sense this is natural. We do slow and mellow as we age. But in other areas of life we adopt this attitude much sooner. It dictates some of our most pernicious collective habits. We are hazardously tolerant of slow, imperceptible, ill-defined deterioration and much prefer it to sudden, potentially catastrophic change. In the latter case the threats are obvious and easy to wrap our minds around, but in the former case the threats are harder to understand and much more tempting to discount.

Consider our driving habits. Although this is not true in other parts of the country, in the Northwest everyone who owns a large SUV (say a Suburban, Expedition, or Tahoe) has to develop an arsenal of explanations as to why they own such a large, inefficient vehicle. Certainly, there are valid reasons to own one, but I am convinced that the primary reason that suburban families drive these cars around is because they feel it is the safest thing that they can do for the kids. This may be true, but it is also possible that global warming may be a much bigger threat to their kids. People with large SUVs often scoff at global warming alarmists and feel threatened by the “liberal elite” trying to take away their freedoms. They may have a point, but a casual observer would rarely be convinced that their assurance that global warming is a hoax is based on their careful consideration of the facts and a conclusion that the case against it is airtight.

I am not taking a hard position here on what cars people should own. I am simply writing against a certain near-sightedness that seems so prevalent in the world. Many people seem anxious to define the world in simple enough terms that they can easily live in it without having to continually question their assumptions or wondering if they are breaking any important rules. We construct for ourselves a conception of reality that allows us to stop doubting ourselves or asking if we have to make any major changes. We are either too lazy or too afraid of ethical failure to allow our ethics get too complicated. We would rather continue playing ethical Minesweeper, using simple rules to mindlessly chart a course through life, than move on to a more complex game that we might not be as good at.

“Global warming can’t be a serious threat,” we tell ourselves, “because if it were, the potential for global disaster and anarchy would be so great that I would not only feel inclined to give up my SUV, but I would have to confront some smug liberals and encourage them to find a better solution than their Hyundais, which still burn 500 gallons of gas for every 700 my Tahoe burns. Next thing you know I will have to change my shopping habits and try to convince others to do the same.” That kind of introspection and potentially radical life change is scary. Truly understanding the situation is really difficult. People will probably make mistakes and look foolish while trying to figure it out. Who wants to deal with that?

The same thing is apparent in our national energy consumption. In the US we have been slow to adopt nuclear energy as the backbone of our energy production and instead have relied on coal. Many look at the potential disaster in Japan right now and think we should give ourselves a pat on the back for our foresight. We fear catastrophic nuclear meltdown- as well we should- but when did we stop counting the cost of coal power? They say about 13,000 people die per year from coal power pollution in the U.S., not to mention the tragic deaths of coal miners and the potential for long-term consequences (global warming, etc). Are we so foolish? Like a frog in a slowly heated pot will we fail to balk at the slowly rising threat around us? Maybe nuclear energy isn’t the answer, but at what point do we demand something different than coal?

Unfortunately, this usually takes a long time because it is hard to get mad about the status quo. I think that’s why I am so excited about the political changes in the Middle East. A dam has finally burst, sparked by the desperate self-immolation of a Tunisian 26-year-old. It’s not hard to protest a sudden imposition, but the slow devolution of power to aging dictators across the Middle East was hard to counteract because even if people were getting angry, they couldn’t be sure that enough of their neighbors were also sufficiently angry to risk joining a protest. But this year, they finally had their Network moment. They decided together that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. It's like clouds. They should form whenever the air reaches 100% humidity, but water has a lot of surface tension and can’t take the first step of condensing into tiny, highly curved water droplets until there is more than 300% humidity. If it weren’t for natural aerosols in the air for water droplets to coalesce around we would rarely see rain.

So while I am thankful that the world is endowed with aerosols, Howard Beales, and Mohamed Bouazizis to spark change (usually quite a bit later than would be ideal) I would much rather that we had some collective foresight. In our democracy we don’t even need to summon up the courage displayed in recent weeks by the Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Syrians because our politicians will respond to our demands for political change and our businesses will respond to our shifting spending habits. But we do need to summon up the courage to put aside our pride and our sloth and our distractions in order to sit down and consider what is really going on in the world around us and what we ought to do about it. If we did this we might find some things to live for, to fight for, maybe even to die for and we wouldn't be so anxious to deaden ourselves to pain. Exposing and refusing to accept the long slow decline of circumstances around us will invigorate us as individuals and help us counter the natural decline going on within us. Oh that when I die my death would be a shock.