It gets like this every year, the gray and cold of winter finally seeping into the very bones by February so that everything is touched. It was just so recently, a spate of freezing rain falling on hardened snow, when I noticed the smallish gray -and -white birds fighting with the chickadees at the bird feeders. “Juncos” I remembered as if it were a revelation: juncos, as my mom had told me in another February decades ago. I don’t know how she knew the name of this common and unspectacular winter bird, and maybe she didn’t either, but I do, this name plucked from someone older than I that was plucked from someone older still, a winter knowledge maybe going back to the Civil War or the Revolution, or whenever my mother’s ancestors began speaking English. So I now have this bird, gray and white as winter itself, and its name a remnant, sunk into my memory like frozen footprints in a lake.
February; how the sun begins to show warmth again towards the middle of the month, and how I, age ten, lay on a brick retaining wall in its slight warmth suffering from what I now know was a concussion, the nausea and headache smoothed into dim dream on that wall as if nothing mattered, not even time. It passed and the apple tree in back bloomed again as sweet as ever, May for youth more joyful at times than Christmas. School’s dismissal would be spring’s final and greatest gift, lending back more seemingly endless time until it wasn’t, when the slow decent into school and gray and cold would begin again.
We all know that the natural world runs in cycles, or more precisely, spirals, returning almost to where it was before again and again, but slightly changed. So the Jurassic era gyrates into the ice ages with timeless patience until it is no longer and then near its opposite; and so the societies of man, nature seeped to their bones, roll out one set of beliefs, then another until they approach their opposites, all while basking beneath the same sun. So the way of nature, so the works of German Idealism in the 19th century, all so clear in this but for one thing: to exactly where does the spiral bring us? If it is nearly to our opposite, then when? And if nothing ever stays the same, then where and when does it go from there?
We don’t think this way much anymore, things changing so fast it seems like broken times or the End Times themselves, but they did have large thoughts not long ago. The “theys” include Aldous Huxley, George Orwell (aka Eric Blair) and Arthur C. Clarke, all British, all affected by one or two of the great wars, but each different in his vision of the future.
Huxley is best known for his Brave New World, where there is One World ruled by a humanistic elite. Reproduction is controlled by the state, where the majority of babies are purposely made mentally deficient so that they will be content doing the menial tasks that society needs. It is a soft totalitarian state, one genuinely interested in the welfare of the people, where social issues are discussed by the Alpha ruling class as aristocrats of the past might have discussed Plato or St Augustine. They mean well. The results are subtly hideous.
We all know Orwell, a student of Huxley while at Eton College. After his youthful upper-class adulation of Marxism, he became deeply disillusioned and angered at the failure of communist Russia to live up to its ideals, as it swiftly became a harsh totalitarian state after the Revolution. Humanitarianism – good intentions - for the dystopia in his book were merely black-is-white covers for total control of the populace by some god-like ruling elite. It is the nightmare of the modern dictatorships, seen from North Korea to Russia to China to Cuba to Vietnam to Venezuela. It is what the citizens of the “free” world fear most, as those in control continually cover up corrupt laws and behaviors with euphemistic labels and spin. It is hideous right out loud, right in our faces, power exposed in the raw.
Then there is Arthur Clarke, born a generation after the former two, and to a middle-class family to whom Oxford was beyond his reach. He wrote spectacular science fiction, including 2001, a Space Odyssey, and Childhood’s End, both dealing with the evolution of Man into something far greater than what we are now. In his view, the marvels of technology will not lead to the dead-end of a hyper-controlled and surveilled state, but rather will help connect us with each other until we reach a critical mass of collective intelligence and evolve into undreamed-of possibilities. His ideas were taken from the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who hypothesized that Man was on the cusp of reaching the Omega Point, this same “critical mass.” He conceptualized a “noosphere” that surrounded the earth in a subtle form, something like a human-centered Gaia, to which we were being steered by God towards a final victory of enlightenment here on earth – and then, perhaps, to well beyond earth, into the stars and the infinite.
Of the latter, we take note – only Teilhard placed God directly in the formula, even though all of the above foresaw a dialectical movement towards some sort of end game. For the darker two, Huxley and Orwell, that end game was driven by Man’s will to power, manifested by domination over his fellow man. For the lighter two, Teilhard and Clarke, they saw a development directed by something else, either by God or the unnamed hidden hand of intelligent design. In comparing both sets, we can conclude that if history is controlled by humans as we know them, it will end in some form of oppressive dystopia; and if by an outer force, then towards far greater heights and wonders, if not heaven itself.
What is happening now in the cutting-edge Western world? Many people from both conservative and liberal camps believe we are nearing an Omega Point, where history as we know it will come to, if not a conclusion, then to some sort of ideological resting point. What we in the religious sector generally see is a movement away from the greater outside forces or force – God for most of us – towards a purely human-driven agenda. Most, then, would probably agree with Huxley and Orwell that this movement will end in misery for the “masses,” as the elite use technology for a more perfect domination. Ultimately, it does not matter whether this movement is propelled by well-intentioned liberals or by dark, hate-filled Antifa types. Humans without humility - humans who do not bow to a greater power - are destined to crush each other either from spite or from a sense of internal superiority. This drive to power began with the first revolt in the Garden of Eden, and it continues to this day for all those who put themselves at the center, religious or not.
So it is that we must first believe that we are being led by something beyond us. In the era of FDR, we were treated to a kindly paternalism that, among many other things, exposed the great unwashed to classical music on federally-funded NPR and even on cartoon shows, all meant to bring us closer to the level of our educated masters, and to think more like them. This was our Brave New World. Now it seems the carrot is being taken away and that we are being given the stick. Raw power is radiating from Washington and from the economic and social elite, as discursive venues are being censored and troops are being readied behind razor wire around the Capital. This looks bad; it is meant to look bad; and that is good. It allows us to see where this new humanism is taking us as it shifts from a ‘soft care’ government to one of forceful control. We can now clearly see how it will end, and that we must avoid this end by withdrawing our belief that government is our ultimate ruler and protector. Without that belief in government, and with an eye towards something far greater, the coercive power of the State will break apart and wash away.
Like a river. A river runs through the town nearest us, but its movement is now unseen, its surface layered in ice, wintered to the bone. But we know that time will pull it through the spiral, the days warming until the hidden currents suddenly shatter the softening ice and carry it away in shrinking shards towards the sea. By this we know that currents are always running through everything whether we see them or not, taking the cold and ice, as well as all our monuments and best-laid plans, with them sooner or later.
Opposites may come on slowly, but often rapidly disappear, all part of the twisting spiral of universal laws. As humans, the most we are required to do is to have faith in the natural flows and the intelligence that directs it. The currents will have their way regardless, but faith is the like the warming sun of spring – the more it shines, the quicker the river is freed from ice.
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