I enjoy living alone. It was many years before I allowed myself to do that. Family values, community values, I was taught, were important and necessary. So, I married. Joined the local Chamber of Commerce and helped promote community events. After I was divorced from a wife, I fell into a very marriage-like relationship. When that ended, I lived in several communities. But, I was always pretty much a loner even then. Much of my time was spent reading. Team sports held no interest for me, although I did play tennis. (It would be years before I realized that athletics and sports are not the same, and I became a devoted long-distance runner and swimmer. I had one running companion, a philosophy professor.)
I quickly learned that an easy way to gain acceptance and respect in the sorts of new-age/post-hippie communities that proliferated in Santa Fe and Washington State was to be a sort of luddite pessimist. Such a facade brought me a lot of really enjoyable sex. It also led me to some friendships with very dear and well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, what is often true about our tools and concepts is that they are judged by their intentions rather than their results.
Ironically enough, it was one of the woo-woo new-age writers I had discovered in Santa Fe, J. R. Stewart, who led me to take a three-month retreat into darkness, a sort of winterreise, during which I seriously considered the bases of my understanding of the world. I had time, and I had a laptop. I had used computers since 1966, first in Chicago for very specific tasks, when computers were only usable for one job at a time, and then to do graphic design in Santa Fe where the market for brochures and posters and such kept me fat and happy. But I had never just explored the world wide web for the data available there. Those three months of casual but wide-ranging research made me realize how unrealistic the woke, progressive pop culture was. I realized that it is corporate farming using GMO's that allow us to feed the 7.5 billion folk living on spaceship earth today, rather than cute little organic gardens. It is nuclear power than can keep the world electrified, rather than the hideous wind and solar farms whose 'ecological dangers' the greens have yet to discover.
And most importantly, those three months made me realize how deeply I had been brain-washed by religion. I try not to be antagonistic to my friends who remain in the church, who still think they are saving the world by eating non-GMO organic kale, because I've been there and I know how comfortable it is.
But more importantly, I am now optimistic. With the new tools of the connected world--Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere--we are able to solve problems which were insoluble just a few years before. A smaller percentage of people will go to sleep hungry tonight than ever before. The problems we face today aren't our problems but our unwillingness to use the tools that will solve them. The difficulties are not that we are living in a period of great change, but that we are unwilling to even try to find ways to adjust to change.
Take, for instance, the emergence of AI as an example of one really huge change through which we are going. Now, I don't really think that 'artificial' is a good description of any kind of intelligence. I think intelligence is just intelligence. As Teilhard de Chardin began to understand, it has evolved, and spread beyond it's old carbon containers. But we tend to act as if 'it' must either be a friend or a foe, or that 'we' might determine which path 'it' takes. I watched a PBS video last night about robots and AI replacing UAW jobs in a Michigan town. The poor people of Saginaw were still driving SUV's and living in houses and eating enough to keep them fat. But their jobs were gone. What I found most flawed about the video was that there was no mention that the jobs that were gone had not existed a hundred years ago. Things change. We need to change, too.
I still enjoy living alone. I'm obsessive-compulsive, perhaps somewhere on the Asperger spectrum. But I enjoy a large and vibrant community who are beginning to share a sort of hive mind. This is an odd thing for me, who has always liked to think of himself as an individualist, to accommodate.
I'm certainly not the only one having difficulty accommodating. As McLuhan pointed out, we have come to live in a global village. A lot of my new age friends thought that would be a really cool thing, because they had never lived in a village. But that is a story for another night. At least in the new on-line village, my community mates don't leave their dishes in the sink over night.
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