Thursday, January 23, 2014

Why, Darwin? (Three Defenses, plus a surprise defense)

The question I have been asked the most by far since I began this project is 'Why Darwin?'

The answer to this questions is still a bunch of loose threads that have not yet come together.

But I have three defenses.

First Defense: preceding art, there is a leap into the unknown.

Second Defense: I have a feeling the narrative of evolution, which is one of the most assumed, widely known, and yet most contested scientific narrative that we have, has something to do with the way we approach climate change.

Darwin's life is a rare example of a story told a thousand times in a thousand different ways, each with absolute certainty.

I myself have a feeling of a man who is not really even a scientist - more of a 'bit parts man' who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Consider a sentence such as this:

"The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such a day brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again".
When I read this, which is taken from The Voyage of the Beagle, and describes Darwin in the Brazillian port of Salvador, I question, earnestly, whether it is written by a scientist or poet.



On face value, such a statement might seem aimed at dismissing his research. Not true - in fact, like most human beings, I rarely believe things which aren't poetry. I listen to them, I try to understand them analytically, but I don't believe them. What I believe are things said in the heat of the moment, things which make no rational sense but which I know to be true because they connect with my human experience. I too have been alone in a forest. I too have heard the sounds of insects from afar and then felt it, up close, disappear. And I'm not a student of Natural History.

Third Defense: when I encounter a narrative that is so subjective, such as the life of a particular human being, told in such an authoritative, objective way, I get sceptical. By which I mean, I start to think about what the motivation might be, and what it is about this particular narrative that is so pivotal.

This also happens when something has a lot of rational evidence to support it, is so objective, and yet becomes a narrative with multiple possible threads. Here, I suppose, I am referring to 'The Climate Change Story'.

Fourth (surprise) Defense: the historical context in which Evolution emerged has always fascinated me. Part of me imagines that in one moment, all of human history was re-written into a linear progression, curling ever upwards exponentially like a graph of Apple's share value. Before then it was just a bunch of random events governed by forces beyond our understanding. Suddenly we were in charge of our own destiny.

And then there's this Climate Change Story, which seems to have its fair share of apocolypse about it. Or, if you like, which obeys what's know as Newton's 3rd Law of Motion:
'What goes up, must comes down', or
'with every action there is an equal and opposite reaction', or
'shit has consequences'.

The human being today finds itself hopelessly paralysed between two polar narratives, one which states that we are making infinite progress and will continue to, and the other which says we're on a trail to self annhilation.

So which is it?

CHOOSE.

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