Celebrating the Grand Canyon

 HUMANISM IS SOMETHING TO LIVE BY,

AND FOR SAVING, AND ENJOYING, THE GRAND CANYON 

So lets start with the substance of what a humanist has as guides; what seems reasonable as ways to help make decisions, choose life paths, come out for and against on the issues of concern.

Golden Rule. Not depriving others of choice and action outside the framework of contract, law, and the other items to which, in some not altogether clear non-mystical sense, we subscribe in order to live in society. The test of improvement: Do our activities in life meet the standard of betterment (and there’s a thicket)? Can your activities be justified as good/bettering without reference to invisible, unverifiable powers? Can we advance ideas based on joint discussion, not imposed notions? Can we tolerate others’ ideas and actions, and to what extent do we oppose them?

How do we live a humanist life? Partly, by not having to live by rituals, other people’s rituals, handed-down rituals. There are personal habits, continued so becoming rituals; they are self-formulated.

As a formality we have to start off with the negatives: the disavowing of the supernatural, immortality, the gods/God, after-life, and so on. Including, if they drag the tag of the superhuman, the big questions: What is there to live for? What justifies human life? What is our purpose? All that stuff is set aside.

My understanding of the universe, while accepting an element of mysteriousness, is based on “scientific” “explanations”. (The quotes recognize the ephemerality of the science and particular explanations over the years. Part of the fun of being a humanist is that you can pursue new and altering explanations without running into arbitrary, ritualist-based, objections.) Our universe, physically, happened, evolves. Undirected. Life appeared. Then: the processes of biological evolution --natural selection of supportive genetic changes --; the chance and randomness of the environment and the creatures engendered in it;  developments we label consciousness and reflection; an awareness of the past and the future as containing different conditions from the present: change, in other words, that we understand we can participate in.

And over the past few millions of years, there evolved strains of what we classify as mammals, primates, one “branch” being hominids, one result (species) being the Homo species of, say, the last million, half-million years. In those times came tool-using, fire/cooked food, a migratory willingness, leading to our living, if changing, through many extreme times, including of glaciation and warming; periods much longer than our life span, and maybe even our collective memories’ span. And some of the times have been more or less benign. And how these long-form experiences are “remembered”? Or not. One of the mysteries.  

More Specifically…

Humanism is a belief set, a creed, a foundation, that fits us, and us in our world.

I believe the biological evolution of hominid, Homo, speech capabilities and the cultural evolution of languages form the key to, the basis of, being human. Not just communication; also thinking-in-time, narrative, abstraction. Education of the young, using language, means telling stories. Some of these stories may well have tapped into the mysteries of our world, may well have dealt with our hopes and fears and sorrows as well as day-to-day-matters. Making decisions about activities -- whether for the day, or planning for longer periods -- involves language constructing narratives, stories that persuade, guide, obtain approval. 

Approval of the group: Humans are social creatures; for tens, hundreds of millennia, that meant groups, bands, of tens, dozens, maybe a few hundred. We interacted with other bands; linguistically (information exchange), sexually, using goods (economic interchange), stories. Our “small”-band sociality was a sine qua non of these human millennia, from way back when into this latest warming period, starting the Holocene from the end of the latest glaciation, 9-10,000 years or so. 

Over all our dozens, hundreds, of millennia, much change, if slow by “modernity’s” frenetic standards, took place. We moved, migration was built into us, to meet our need for water and sustenance—our gathering and killing for food, our need for shelter, and warmth for comfort and cooking. Clothing/footwear, art, pictorial record, structures, proliferation of tool-making, the use of fire to enrich our environment’s productivity; change, reflection upon change, innovation. Music may have preceded, developed with, language — an expression of our devotion to stories and the emotions accompanying them. Art appeared, meeting today’s terms, but from its beginnings, visual expression was a continuing strand of human cooperation. Domestication, perhaps first of beasts, companions or sustenance, was invented as a supplement,— or was perhaps even superior — to simple consumption. In our increasing sophistication, we were as if becoming ready for dealing with, taking advantage of, a retreat of that last ice and cold, a warming and increase in environment’s fecundity, which we partook in. The end of the Paleolithic, that long time when we, seemingly, arguably, fit, as an element, not the dominant, of the world, our environment.

The Anthropocene, this era of world-impacting human activity, started in the Neolithic as our numbers increased and our settlements densified; as our inventiveness accelerated, proliferated,  expressed in the invention of farming, domestication through intensive cultivation of a relatively few plants, and the supporting social inventions: planning as a delaying into the unknown, debt and taxes as the provision of resources to supply and maintain farmers  during the time of cultivation and harvest. 

Humanism Is An Old Guide

Humanism belonged in that long pre-Anthropocene, underpinned it: the understanding of the worth and necessity of living, surviving, prospering, having-raising-educating children; continuation. Maybe abstraction was indulged in. We must have spent some story-telling time boasting or puzzling out or coping with the new and the different. Not yet using that Anthropogenic invention, religion; rather, we felt a belief in our own worth and interest, in our capability to get along, as we told it in our narratives and talked it over, maybe sometimes with other bands who brought different stories from different places. So we must have had some theory of the human, encouraging our puzzling out each others’ languages. We must have been able to escape fears leading to hostility and the loss of chances to exchange information and experiences.

Our band instinct, altruistic, strengthened, as it helped explicate our being with others, in our narratives; it was a realization of the importance of what we did, living and moving. Stories made sense of these activities. Say: we talked, therefore we became. Say, we were aware of us being, therefore we thought ourselves worth being, and told ourselves so. Our experience of death, likely frequent, was part of life, not the end of it. Some died; some did not; all had participated; the band, the community, the “we” was continuing, was worth continuing. Our living in and with the world brought a sense of the worth of human life and lives. Perhaps not a dedication to progress, to our getting better and better; maybe that requires the conscious shaping that came with the invention of domestication. Still we did know bounty and did know want. We did know about moving, searching out food and comfort and safety sources; we did migrate, i.e., saying “here we are, and it is not so great; we will now pick up and go to another place”. 

It is hard to resist elevating this existence; not necessarily to noble savagery; certainly not. However, it was a life that we had evolved in, the life where the environment— with all its changes sudden and long-lasting— and the human got used to each other. Stories of conquest were not needed; the reality of accommodation and  achieving it using language was more than enough. We would have been constantly and repeatedly challenged to learn what we needed and where to find it, or how to move on. It was, I am trying to say, a time, long times, of a world that, even if not scaled to humans, was one we knew intimately, and we knew how to fit into or flee.

Humanism, that is to say, could develop in our millennia of survival, and even of our suffering and prospering. There were plenty of other-scale events and beings, both small and large. We did not need to invent anything to give us a sense of what we were capable of and what was best avoided; no need to reverence super-others; plenty of thought was needed to relate, plan, achieve, and reflect. The story, our stories, were our medium, our lessons. Maybe sometimes we exaggerated for narrative impact. However, getting it right meant getting it aligned with the world, true in the world, not fantasizing some out-of-proportion alien. Later, language would give humans grandiosity; in the pre-Anthropocene, narration was our tool, narrative our guide. Remembering, re-telling, was to ground us, provide a sense of proportion and agency. 

Where is that humanism, that narrative of the world, told on our human scale, today? Is it eclipsed by so much fantasy that is grander, deeper, more full of promise and promises, more reverential, more dizzy with swirl and ceremony and great pronouncements, more attuned to the beau-male ideal that the Anthropocene is built to suit?

Super Men and the Mess We Made

That superhuman perspective, that Divinity Option, that in-His-own-image stuff, certainly had its chance, its day, as an integral part, a major support, for the male-centered social organizations that emerged out of the innovations of the Neolithic and flourish patchily in our most recent 6-8 millennia. And certainly the be-suited profiteering wanna-be-emperors who wish always to dominate and control embrace that Option. However, the birth and growth of the Anthropocene, the retailing of the world’s his-stories originated to support the Neolithic Revolution, is not the purpose of this essay;  just this fast splash of male centricity and its supernatural is needed before we discuss humanism as a set of guiding ideas today. 

All of that, that divinity, reverence, higher power stuff, is now most obviously a distraction, just one of the props developed in the changes that marked our political evolution from small farming-based settlements into the ever-more complex arrangements to regulate and control the land and the labor to work it for food and ever-denser populations. Those changes, the ones that brought government and empire and organized religion and compulsory obedience, are distortions, insisted upon even as they were dissented from, as men used force to bend and twist and bloat tasks of protection and organization into more permanent, more self-gratifying roles as rulers, and even self-anointed “gods”. 

Modestly, We Can Clean It Up

Humanism scrapes off all that intoxicating glory, and concentrates on the greater benefit -- not of worship or glorification -- from Homo sapiens re-invigorating a human scale for human agency, what we have done, can do, should do, for us in the world that supports us.

Rinsing out of our minds the falsehood that Homo sapiens was put here for some, Anybody Else’s, heavenly purpose, we can appreciate our capacity and capability and I argue responsibility, to provide ourselves with the awareness, and the anthropogenic power, to affect, radically affect, this planet,—- to protect our home. 

We have proven we can change it in small and in planet-wide ways. A humanist believes our ethics include the command to act in ways that are shaped to promote sustainability. We need to understand it, to protect and preserve it as our home, to protect and preserve it in its varieties, which even today we are still far from comprehending.

Needless to say, this is not the male-dominance way, that thrives on exploitation and the illusion that abundance is forever.

An Example

The American Wilderness System (NWS) marks out and collects many natural places/land(water)scapes, and seeks to modulate human behavior so as to avoid degrading their make-up. It is a kind of upgraded zoning, where the goal is to avoid marking areas for various human uses, but to say: these areas are not available for the anthropogenic activities that have, over the past 10 millennia given birth to the Anthropocene.

Now, a Wilderness designated in our National Wilderness System, is not pristine in the sense that it exists and lives on as it was before our Neolithic launch into world-straddling civilizations. No place on Earth can anymore claim to be so pristine. Nevertheless, places in the NWS are considered to be of such value as we now encounter them, that Americans have decided as a legal, political, governmental matter, to try to keep them as they are. To try, even as we use them for study, for recreation, as curbs on rabid exploitation. We have set standards and policies to implement this effort at preservation, a kind of stasis; a kind that has mostly in the past been abhorrent to our desire and need to exploit our planetary inheritance for our immediate comfort and aggrandizement. 

A humanist believes, and acts on that belief, that it is worth while to extend the concept of the NWS world-wide, to designate and preserve many other places, as places of research, education, and delight, and in some sense, in their own right to exist and evolve, while we eschew our active intervention.

The NWS is only one such governmental creation. The National Park System, Wildlife Refuges, and by extension, proposals for wildlife Corridors, for rehabilitation. They all are under-girded by the humanist belief that our earthly environment is finite in any given configuration, and that some areas and life processes should not be open to human exploitation, but preserved/protected/used such that changes natural to that landscape can occur while humans work to minimize their activities (as defined in law and use) and impact.

These creations, these positive embraces of our world, are minor on  humans’ industrial scale. Just like, while the Ogres of Environmental Savaging we’ve unleashed stalk us, fetidly breathing ever hotter, we entertain ourselves exploring the wonders of the universe employing astronomical toys that mostly do no harm. 

Another Little Humanist Example — With a Grand Result

The Grand Canyon is not some God’s altar, or even Creation. Yet for all its immensity, it is a place which we can contemplate, walk or boat about in, get in touch with, a bit. A very Universe of canyons, yes, but still, one that rewards our attempts to enjoy it, study, philosophize about it. A very human-scale immensity; feeling small in it, actually gives one a good frisson, yes?

Whatever our hopes were in 1968 about saving the Grand Canyon from the super-Anthropogenic scheme of being turned into an industrial park through the construction of two massive concrete dams (plus plethora of appurtenant works), we could not have claimed that we intended to head off the climate change that we now understand as one of the more pervasive and unpredictable results of our Anthropocene. 

Certainly, the water gurus of those times thrashed in the strait-jacket they had woven, knowingly, yet which they still sought to extend: the construction of a man-made world requiring the endless provision of water for populated areas that produced almost none. They clamored for and bet on their power to alter the continent’s water economy. They failed. 

Half a century later, two landscapes are apparent: 1) The Grand Canyon stands, laid out as an environmental icon we can revel in. Not unsullied, but still undiminished, it is a reminder that we can understand and choose the path away from the false belief that our exploitation of our environment, our world, our life support, has no constraints. 

2) Our blindness in believing in an unbounded industrialized America has had the time to be countered and lightened a bit by the unpredictable events our Anthropocene machinations set in motion. Saying “no” to dams in the Grand Canyon has given Gaia time to get her breath and really start to huff and puff, blow and storm. We begin to make out the tough country we have put ourselves in. Still, we are only stumbling about, unable to rapidly shake off the shackles of our devotion to our Anthropocene.

The Grand Canyon, undammed, affected by dams, shouts out the message that we can choose beneficently for our future. 

But too often, in our strait-jacket, can not.