Words&Dirt

“World currency markets are rocked by the turbulent force of electronically lubricated financial speculation.  Weapons of mass destruction are cultivated by rogue regimes and New Age cults.  Nations seem less cohesive than before, afflicted by ethnic or religious or cultural faction.  Health officials seriously discuss the prospect of a worldwide plague––the unspeakably gruesome Ebola virus, perhaps, or some microbe we don’t yet know about, spread around the world by jet-propelled travelers.  Even tropical storms seem to have grown more intense in recent decades, arguably a result of global warming.

It sounds apocalyptic, and some religiously minded people think it literally is.  They have trouble imagining that this rash of new threats could be mere coincidence––especially coming, as it has, at the end of a millennium.  Some fundamentalist Christians cite growing global chaos as evidence that Judgment Day is around the corner.  A whole genre of best-selling novels envisions ‘the Rapture,’ the day when true believers, on the way to heaven, meet Christ in midair, while others, down below, find a less glamorous fate.

In a sense these fundamentalists are right.  No, I don’t mean about the Rapture.  I just mean that growing turmoil does signify, by my lights, a distinct step in the unfolding of what you could call the world’s destiny.  We are indeed approaching a culmination of sorts; our species seems to face a kind of test toward which basic forces of history have been moving us for millennia.  It is a test of political imagination––of our ability to accept basic, necessary changes in structures of governance––but also a test of moral imagination.

So how will be do on this test?  Judging by history, the current turbulence will eventually yield to an era of relative stability, an era when global political, economic, and social structures have largely tamed the new forms of chaos.  The world will reach a new equilibrium, at a level of organization higher than any past equilibrium.  And the period we are now entering will, in retrospect, look like the storm before the calm.

Or, on the other hand, we could blow up the world.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 9

“He bowed to the Countess of Dorchester and exchanged some sort of acrid greeting with Father Petre.  These people did not like him, did not want him here, would never be friendly to him in any sense that counted.  And yet there was a symmetry here that unnerved him.  He’d seen wary curiosity on their faces, then recognition, and now polite masks had fallen over their covert thoughts as they wondered why he was here, and tried to fit Daniel Waterhouse into some larger picture.

But if Daniel had held a mirror up to his own face he’d have seen just the same evolution.

He was one of them.  Not as powerful, not as highly ranked––in fact, completely unranked––but he was here, now, and for these people that was the only sort of rank that amounted to anything.  To be here, to smell the place, to bow to the mistresses, was a sort of initiation.  Drake would have said that merely to set foot in such people’s houses and show them common courtesy was to be complicit in their whole system of power.  Daniel and most others had scoffed at such rantings.  But now he knew it was true, for when the Countess had acknowledged his presence and known his name, Daniel had felt important.  Drake––if he’d had a grave––would have rolled over in it.  But Drake’s grave was the air above London.”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 632-3