There is nothing to do. It’s absurd to look for yet more change, to get out of the alleged mess. I use my five senses and all the other ones too. The mess is a miasma perceived by those who perceive it.
The problems were caused by too much change, too fast. They won’t be solved by more of the same. I know it’s tempting when we get lost, that is to say when we find ourselves in the wrong place, to go faster to get out of there.
There isn’t really any progress: not in the sense of betterment. That’s all propaganda. Really, we are passengers in a cab, in no hurry for our destination—what else is it but death? But we picked a cab whose driver, let’s call him Capital or Finance, whips the poor horse, let’s call it Economic Growth, in unnecessary competition against the other drivers, till the poor thing drops dead between the shafts. Oh but, you say, technology has taken us beyond the Hansom cab; we are no longer sallying forth from Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes and Watson! An elementary observation indeed. Is this cause for self-congratulation?
Things change, that’s their nature. But it’s better not to flog the slow horse.
The young always want to change the world, always rebel against their parents’ world, they say. This is propaganda from those with no cultural memory. Read Kipling, Conrad, T. H. White, Belloc (I won’t interrupt this diatribe with references or quotes): they all speak, nostalgically for the most part, of the challenge of human skills and trades. For myself, I count myself not a man if my only accomplishments are to think thoughts and tap this keyboard. I must saw, forge, sculpt, weld, rivet, dig, sow, enrich, harvest. Or sail tall ships (sadly they are no more); engage in falconry, archery, jousting. Anything to avoid becoming a scoundrel, whether of the politician, lawyer, journalist or clergy type. I could add almost any desk-bound profession.
If we can’t do this—I mean, wind the clock back—and it’s clear we can’t, then Nature will do it for us: nothing easier for Nature than to cut off a few of the basics on which our complacency has depended.
Yes, I’m nostalgic for a Golden Age; that perennial mirage of old men looking back to their childhood—selectively of course. There’s a pleasure in that, and a sense of passing down a torch of continuity from a distant past: remembering the best, shunning the most hellish parts. It’s a form of natural selection running in parallel with the genetic, Darwinian one.
But the most important selection is to pick the golden moments from the day and dwell in that vision, as a whale dwells in the vast ocean, subsisting on invisible plankton. To reduce it to a word, my recipe for salvation, individual or global, would not be change, but awareness.