In Acknowledgement of Small and Scary Miracles

Less than a day ago, I was on another continent. Between then and now, I have navigated two cities and an ocean. The day started with me ordering a car on my phone, which arrived within four minutes of my request. It brought me to an international airport, where I was processed and scanned and deposited in an unappealing frequent flyer lounge. When I flew, it was in moderate comfort. At my fingertip were dozens of movies to choose from if I wished. During the flight, pleasant people brought me two hot meals. Upon arriving in New York to transfer to my flight to Savannah, I spent approximately twenty seconds breezing through Customs thanks to Global Entry. Once in Savannah, I discovered my luggage hadn’t made the trip with me. The woman at the Customer Service desk located my suitcases within moments; they were still in New York. As it turns out the fault with them not making it southward with me was my own. I did not know that I had to retrieve my bags in New York and re-check them for the flight to Savannah. Nobody had told me that, I explained to the woman. “No problem,” she told me. They would be on the first flight out of JFK in the morning and be on my doorstep by the afternoon. My son drove me home in an electric car guided by GPS (not sure why he doesn’t know his way to and from the airport yet), and after greeting my dogs, I cracked open an ice-cold Diet Coke and fell asleep in my own bed, 4,000 miles from where I began the day, while watching people in Los Angeles play high-stakes poker on my laptop computer.

Not even a handful of decades ago, much of the above paragraph would have read like science-fiction. A hundred years ago, it would have been gobbledygook. But it’s our reality. For all of the horrors of modernity, I am still occasionally struck by our amazing everyday world; I mean, I asked for a hot tea with milk on a flying tube 35,000 ft above the planet’s surface and nobody even batted an eye. What?!?

What?!?

While I have long-lamented capitalism’s corrosive effects on the human spirit, I also have to give credit where credit is due. And I am tempted to thank capitalism for the miracle of yesterday’s journey, but that’s too simplistic. Yes, the profit motive certainly contributed the success of my trip, but so did the colorless business of government regulation. Those bureaucrats of the middle managerial class made sure the airplane upon which I flew adhered to a host of safety standards I’m sure many airlines would have preferred to ignore. For example, our flight out of New York was delayed for about twenty minutes because a seat in Row 14 had an issue with its ability to recline. So what, right? Well, the pilot explained, Maintenance needed to fix the seat because it could become a safety issue if we needed to evacuate. Annoying, sure, but it’s these sorts of niggling regulations that combine to make air travel the safest way to haul one’s bones from Point A to Point B.

Thanks, Deep State.

Stepping back a moment, though, economic and governmental systems are themselves byproducts of something more fundamental in our species, which is the deep desire to self-organize. We’re obviously not alone in that regard. Plenty of species organize. Plenty build packs and tribes and colonies. But none have our brain power. None have the ability to communicate complicated ideas, or even – so far as we know - to have those ideas. No other species has ever hastened its own evolution.

Because that’s where we are now, here in the Anthropocene Era. People have been around for something like a million years. We’ve had civilization for only about 10,000 of those years, the first 9,700 of which were mostly spent figuring out how to feed ourselves and beating each other up. While plenty of people still don’t have enough to eat, and although we’re still beating each other up, it also feels like we’re on the edge of another path now. We’ve gone from a species that, like every other species that has come before, reacts to its environment to a species that, unlike every other species that has come before, creates it. Spooky.

It’s spooky because we have this ability, and know we have this ability, and also know we shouldn’t be trusted with this ability. Yet there’s no way to turn back. Nor, when I think about it, do I really want to.

The problems we’ve made for ourselves are real and they are profound. Forget nations for a moment – civilization itself is still young. As ramshackle as our institutions feel at the moment, we’re also tempting the destruction of our entire ecology. Can a single species bring down a planet? Some days it feels like we’re doing our best to try.

On the other hand, maybe that same fundamental desire to organize and innovate will continue to push us forward. It’s obviously too late to keep the planet from warming to dangerous levels. It’s obviously too late to uninvent weapons of mass destruction. That’s our reality now, too. But maybe if our ethical progress can start to keep pace with our technological progress we can mitigate and even reverse some of the damage we’ve done to ourselves and those in our care.

Maybe?

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m kind of awed by the fact that I live now, in this time, when it’s possible to do these miraculous things we take for granted. Even though it’s our reality, sometimes it still doesn’t quite seems real to me. Maybe we need some extra synapses or something to take in this much reality. And no, I’m not signing up for Elon Musks’s Neuralink anytime soon. But the fact that our species has even gotten to the point where some dudebro can offer us cyborg kits is enough to make the synapses that I do have misfire.

I crossed a continent yesterday with ease. So did thousands upon thousands of other people just like me. We didn’t think much about it. Now I’m home writing a letter to thousands of strangers wondering what this kind of astounding progress means. Can miracles be scary?