Earth From Right Here
Caught the "Earth From The Air" exhibit in London on Sunday afternoon. Liz and Jules were kind enough to take us around a bit, so we wandered here and there between the rows of four-foot photos next to the Thames.
The photographer (who's French, but we'll forgive him for that) spent eight thousand hours in rented helicopters taking pictures of fairly ordinary things from above. Some were unusual natural phenomena - deserts, glaciers, the sea - while most were of scenes you walk through ten times a day, just from a different perspective. The photos were beautifully composed and strikingly attractive to the eye. It was the captions that got a little old.
The overall theme was of environmental concern, a plea for sustainability, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. Now, i have a degree in environmental science sitting around somewhere - i used to read books on sustainable agriculture for fun, back before i lost all those IQ points as a deckhand - so if this bothered me, it must have been pretty bad. There was just such a uniform tone of disapproving, almost scolding, concern throughout. In general the captions were worded with such earnest solemnity as only those associated with universities can normally muster for any length of time without falling on the floor helpless with laughter at their own self-importance. (If you think the words "pious" and "secular" are opposites, you've been out of school for too long.)
And it was all such good material, too. Only a few figures of dubious origin, and so many fine hard facts on the harm we're doing ourselves via the harm we're doing our surroundings (the surroundings, surprisingly enough to many, that sustain us). But he was concerned about everything. It was like he couldn't help himself once he got into that handwringing frame of mind. He took a photo of a shipwreck and ended the caption with a solemn instructive about how several crewmembers are harmed every single year in the shipping industry. It was actually very similar to the caption under the preceding photo, which i think was of a volcano destroying a town. Paternalism annoys me in general, but this was just funny. Among the other mild absurdities that tickled my fancy was his implicit lumping of natural disasters in with the ones caused by human beings. Aside from the action-oriented problems this creates - e.g., how exactly should we go about eliminating volcanoes and earthquakes? - i think something in it offends my sense of history. I mean all of history, not the last six or seven hundred years that come most immediately to mind.
See, i realized the other day that i'd always thought of history in terms of the Renaissance onwards. Most of us do, i think. We like to believe we're on this constant ascent, getting more advanced and civilized all the time. The problem with this is a little thing called reversion to the mean. Case in point: the fall of the Roman Empire. What happened to them anyway? Was it the lead pipes? Or did they just get fat and lazy and stop caring about anything but their bread and circuses while the Visigoths came in and set off bombs in their subways, er, i mean, sacked their cities?
Admittedly, the division between barbaric and civilized sounds a bit un-PC. But it's not a discriminatory thing at all. In the Middle Ages, the Muslims built the most civilized society on earth. Math, science, astronomy, you name it, while illiterate northern Europe was wallowing around in the mud. But the Muslim empires crumbled as well, edged out by the benighted forces of the barbarian Christians. Tables turn, and i think that's the thing: Stuff happens. The pendulum swings. Reversion to the mean. Put simply, the barbarians will always win in the end.
This weekend i'm rereading "Fight Club," Chuck Palahniuk's little anarchist manifesto, and it is the perfect counterpoint to "Earth From The Air." They need each other. To me, anarchy is kind of like socialism without the idealism, so it's funny how they end up going opposite directions in practice. Pure socialism assumes human nature is basically good, strives to fix the problems created because it's actually not, and fails for the same reason. As it is, i'd really like to be a pure socialist, except that human nature isn't good. But if it were, i'd definitely be an anarchist, because things would work a lot better.
But they wouldn't. So here we are having to look out for each other and recycle and reduce our CO2 emissions, all for the good of the human race, and it's all so good and so truly necessary, and it's all going to look so ridiculously hopeless in five hundred years when we're hunting elk with Tyler Durden in the vine-covered ruins of Manhattan. So what do you do? You recycle. And you should. What can we ever do in anything but work on our little beach regardless of what the ocean's doing? And the really strange part is, that might be more than okay. Maybe it's the best thing to do. Jesus didn't want to be king, right? He didn't deal much with numbers or empires or trying to change the world. It was through his faithfulness in doing his own almost totally ignored little thing, off in the backwater Roman equivalent of Namibia or somewhere, that the world was changed beyond what anyone - including his own followers - had any capacity to imagine. It shouldn't have worked. But maybe that's the only way things do work. Dunno.
Okay, now that i've talked myself into a corner and i'm too lazy to get out, my attention is wandering. Used to be, i could pay twenty large a year to waste time like this. Don't you miss college sometimes?
The photographer (who's French, but we'll forgive him for that) spent eight thousand hours in rented helicopters taking pictures of fairly ordinary things from above. Some were unusual natural phenomena - deserts, glaciers, the sea - while most were of scenes you walk through ten times a day, just from a different perspective. The photos were beautifully composed and strikingly attractive to the eye. It was the captions that got a little old.
The overall theme was of environmental concern, a plea for sustainability, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. Now, i have a degree in environmental science sitting around somewhere - i used to read books on sustainable agriculture for fun, back before i lost all those IQ points as a deckhand - so if this bothered me, it must have been pretty bad. There was just such a uniform tone of disapproving, almost scolding, concern throughout. In general the captions were worded with such earnest solemnity as only those associated with universities can normally muster for any length of time without falling on the floor helpless with laughter at their own self-importance. (If you think the words "pious" and "secular" are opposites, you've been out of school for too long.)
And it was all such good material, too. Only a few figures of dubious origin, and so many fine hard facts on the harm we're doing ourselves via the harm we're doing our surroundings (the surroundings, surprisingly enough to many, that sustain us). But he was concerned about everything. It was like he couldn't help himself once he got into that handwringing frame of mind. He took a photo of a shipwreck and ended the caption with a solemn instructive about how several crewmembers are harmed every single year in the shipping industry. It was actually very similar to the caption under the preceding photo, which i think was of a volcano destroying a town. Paternalism annoys me in general, but this was just funny. Among the other mild absurdities that tickled my fancy was his implicit lumping of natural disasters in with the ones caused by human beings. Aside from the action-oriented problems this creates - e.g., how exactly should we go about eliminating volcanoes and earthquakes? - i think something in it offends my sense of history. I mean all of history, not the last six or seven hundred years that come most immediately to mind.
See, i realized the other day that i'd always thought of history in terms of the Renaissance onwards. Most of us do, i think. We like to believe we're on this constant ascent, getting more advanced and civilized all the time. The problem with this is a little thing called reversion to the mean. Case in point: the fall of the Roman Empire. What happened to them anyway? Was it the lead pipes? Or did they just get fat and lazy and stop caring about anything but their bread and circuses while the Visigoths came in and set off bombs in their subways, er, i mean, sacked their cities?
Admittedly, the division between barbaric and civilized sounds a bit un-PC. But it's not a discriminatory thing at all. In the Middle Ages, the Muslims built the most civilized society on earth. Math, science, astronomy, you name it, while illiterate northern Europe was wallowing around in the mud. But the Muslim empires crumbled as well, edged out by the benighted forces of the barbarian Christians. Tables turn, and i think that's the thing: Stuff happens. The pendulum swings. Reversion to the mean. Put simply, the barbarians will always win in the end.
This weekend i'm rereading "Fight Club," Chuck Palahniuk's little anarchist manifesto, and it is the perfect counterpoint to "Earth From The Air." They need each other. To me, anarchy is kind of like socialism without the idealism, so it's funny how they end up going opposite directions in practice. Pure socialism assumes human nature is basically good, strives to fix the problems created because it's actually not, and fails for the same reason. As it is, i'd really like to be a pure socialist, except that human nature isn't good. But if it were, i'd definitely be an anarchist, because things would work a lot better.
But they wouldn't. So here we are having to look out for each other and recycle and reduce our CO2 emissions, all for the good of the human race, and it's all so good and so truly necessary, and it's all going to look so ridiculously hopeless in five hundred years when we're hunting elk with Tyler Durden in the vine-covered ruins of Manhattan. So what do you do? You recycle. And you should. What can we ever do in anything but work on our little beach regardless of what the ocean's doing? And the really strange part is, that might be more than okay. Maybe it's the best thing to do. Jesus didn't want to be king, right? He didn't deal much with numbers or empires or trying to change the world. It was through his faithfulness in doing his own almost totally ignored little thing, off in the backwater Roman equivalent of Namibia or somewhere, that the world was changed beyond what anyone - including his own followers - had any capacity to imagine. It shouldn't have worked. But maybe that's the only way things do work. Dunno.
Okay, now that i've talked myself into a corner and i'm too lazy to get out, my attention is wandering. Used to be, i could pay twenty large a year to waste time like this. Don't you miss college sometimes?
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