NOVEMBER 25, 2024 – Reactions vary among the roughly 73 million voters who voted for Kamala Harris. Some people are scandalized and looking into permanent residency, even full citizenship requirements, in Canada, Costa Rica, Ireland or Portugal. Others are in the ring with a bunch of fellow angry Democrats accusing the Harris campaign and party leadership of malfeasance over policy substance and political messaging. Yet another group, trying to put the best face on things, are decamping from their constant news watch and putting up Christmas lights early and turning them all the way up in blind faith that something good will leap from the surrounding darkness.
Me? If I’m honest with you, I vacillate between fatalistic despair and fatalistic realism. The former arises from my risk aversion (which, I submit, is a salient side effect of the aging process) and my fear that on the “descendancy” is respect for character, reason, science, decency, integrity, competence, breadth of perspective, experience in its multifarious manifestations. My fatalistic realism stems from a general study of history and the seemingly inalterable cycle of themes that color the past and with suggestive strokes, paint the future.
Whether I’m at one side of or the other of the pendulum’s swing, I strive to be—and for the most part, am—personally optimistic about the human condition overall. My world view is similar to how I perceive a dense forest from a thousand feet above, from the waters 300 meters beyond shore, or from an opposing slope in the mountains. That is, from any of these perspectives, the crowd of trees form a green knitwork in which individual aspects, some distinctive, are subservient to their grand collective appearance. The outward appearance of the forest is unified, ordered, coherent, even soft, lush, interesting and inviting.
But as you approach the entrance to the green mansion, sharp dead branches—the sort that would jab, prick, stab if you fell into them—block your way. When you peer beyond the defensive works, you see sap draining down the trunk an injured tree; arboreal scars, deformities and other imperfections. Upon stepping around the fir tree bayonets, you swat at the mosquito biting the back of your neck. You cry “Ouch!” when your toe strikes a sharp rock . Stopped in your tracks, you look down and see molds and mushrooms across the forest floor, then toads and other slimy organisms that you’d rather not touch unless as an undergraduate you majored in biology. Without proper gear, you wouldn’t think of spending the night on a bed of rocks, sticks and rotting detritus. Moreover, lurking about are bears, wolves, skunks, porcupine, any of which could do you serious harm.
Yet, you also encounter the close-up wonders of the woods: soft mosses; delicate woodland flowers; bright red berries and shiny thick leaves of wintergreen; the fruit of blueberry plants; ferns as intricate as Royal Lace doilies; the regal presence of a huge whitetail buck; the tremolo of a loon off the adjacent lake; songbirds that fly like high-velocity needles threading their way through legions of sun-seeking, densely arranged trees. All that you encounter is ephemeral, yet perpetual in its replication.
In other words, I see the history of civilization as a forest—impressive from afar but when examined closely, replete with broad spectra of dangers, annoyances, and imperfections but also filled with glorious wonders, small and grand.
To take all this a step further, I see the noise, the shocks, the grief, the mischief, the failures and the tragedies—but also the many victories and successes—of our present epoch as nothing more, nothing less than the inevitable extension of all civilizations, now melded, that preceded us.
No matter what part of the inhabited earth you examine, you will discover empires that came and went; wealth that grew to staggering heights before toppling to the ground; power that rose and fell; truths that turned into falsehoods but blasphemies also that found acceptance as truths; justice now viewed as unjust and injustices, long ago revoked; jarring words in the form of oppressive edicts; artfully arranged language in the form of Pushkin and Shakespeare; shepherd huts and intricate temples and grand cathedrals; cave etchings and Hagia Sophia; nuclear arsenals and massive anti-war demonstrations powerful enough to end the Vietnam War; starving children and charities established to save the starving children; and so on and so forth.
What best depicts civilization—past, present and future—is the Yin Yang, imprinted on the heart of the human condition. We cannot escape the opposing forces of good and evil, locked in constant struggle, though rarely in perfect balance. It’s best, I think, to accept, even embrace, this reality, understanding that individually and collectively, we are beholden to cyclicality; to the pendulum of fate; to the inevitability of “bad stuff” but in equal measure, to the inexorable presence of divine works—by the random hand of nature, as well as by the design and labors of our species.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
