Words&Dirt

“Oyonnax, in a strange girlish gesture, put a gloved hand to her lips, suppressing a laugh.  ‘You still do not understand.  Versailles is like this window.’  She swept her arm out, directing Eliza’s eye to a scene in stained glass.  ‘Beautiful, but thin, and brittle.’  She opened the casement below to reveal the street beyond: a wood-carrier, looking like a wild man, had dropped his load to have a fist-fight with a young Vagabond who had taken offense because the wood-carrier had bumped into a whore that the Vagabond was escorting into an alley.  A man blinded by smallpox was squatting against a wall releasing a bloody phlux from his bowels.  ‘Beneath the lovely glaze, a sea of desperation.  When people are desperate, and praying to God has failed, they begin to look elsewhere.'”

––The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 269-70

“Edward O. Wilson has suggested that the ‘evolutionary epic’ serve as our binding myth in the modern scientific age––a myth not in the sense of an untruth, but in the sense of a story that explains our existence and helps us orient ourselves to the world.  ‘Every epic needs a hero,’ he writes.  ‘The mind will do.’  In a sense, yes; the human mind represents the triumph of our lineage against great odds; its survival, by pluck and luck, as countless others perished; its ascent toward comprehension of itself and its creator, natural selection.  At the same time, there is cause to pay tribute to another mind: the ‘mind’ that mediates natural selection.  It is the relentless burgeoning of this creative biosphere, the self-accelerating growth in its innovation, that set the stage for our triumph.  This giant mind all but ensured that, whether or not the human species finally reached a reflective intelligence, some species would.

We are thus generic and unique.  We embody, in some essential way, the natural imperative toward intelligence (and the natural tension between conflict and integration, between zero-sum and non-zero-sum logic); yet we also bear the distinctive marks of our peculiar history.

Now humanity, having emerged from one great global mind, has finally, in the modern era, given birth to another.  Our species is the link between biosphere and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the ‘noosphere,’ the electronically mediated web of thought that had taken crystalline form by the end of the second millennium.  This is a mind to which the whole species can contribute, and a mind whose workings will have consequences for the whole species––epic consequences of one sort or another.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 297