My mother was an elementary school teacher back in the days when a single year at Illinois State Normal University was enough to qualify you as a teacher.
She only taught for a few years but never stopped learning. In fact, I can remember her frequently making the comment that the day you stop learning is the day you start to die.
By the time I was in high school, we had moved from Illinois to Flagstaff, Ariz., and she went back to school. This time she aimed for a degree in library science. Before I was out of school she had become the head librarian in Flagstaff and I was spending afternoons reading stacks.
Learning and reading became a habit. It was with this in mind that I tackled "Consilience" by Edward O. Wilson. It is not what anyone would call an easy read and I don't expect many to rush to the library and check out a copy. In fact, I guess that there is enough material there to generate a year's worth of columns, but don't worry. I will not do that.
Wilson set himself a significant task. Even the title sent me to a dictionary. Merriam Webster defines consilience as "the linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory."
Wilson's goal was to demonstrate first that there was a unity in all knowledge and that the methods of science can guide us while we fill in the gaps. If the greatness of an author is determined by the scope of the tasks that they take on, then Wilson ranks very high.
What I do want to take away from Wilson's mighty effort are the two issues that he raises in the final chapter. He refers to them as our Faustian Bargains and leaves open the question of whether we are dealing with the Faust of Marlowe, damned from the moment he makes his choice, or that of Goethe who found redemption from his love of Margaret and his desire to help humanity.
The first is what Wilson refers to as the Ratchet of Progress. "The more knowledge people acquire, the more they are able to increase their numbers and to alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive."
Advanced technology has become our Saviour. He asks us to compare the results of taking away electricity from a group of Australian Aborigines and from the residents of California. The results would be vastly different.
We have to start asking ourselves just where all of this progress is leading.
Can we, in fact, sustain the economic and population growth that we currently have in a world where resources are finite?
At some point it would seem that this growth must come to a halt unless we are willing to be the future of mankind on our ability to solve the problems of interstellar travel.
At present, it seems that we have become so used to the images of Star Trek or Star Wars that we forget the fact that the underlying technologies are far beyond the reach of our best minds.
The second Faustian Bargain is apparent to Wilson because he is an evolutionary biologist.
He fully understands the role that evolution has played in the creation of the world that we now experience.
Just as surely, he understands that part of our evolution involves the brain and its ability to comprehend the world, to develop strategies for survival.
Wilson goes beyond this to ask one more question. Given that this good son of Southern Baptist parents sees evolution as the mechanism by which we became what we are, he now questions whether we will continue on the evolutionary path that we have been on, or filled with the hubris of a little knowledge, will we decide that we know enough to make volitional evolutionary choices, in effect to replace the mechanism of natural selection with one of social choice.
I find the latter option to be very scary. Humans have shown a decided propensity for not understanding complex issues and for making wrong choices. This is a case where I don't think that we can afford the luxury of a mistake.
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth."
~ Roberto Clemente
Wes Rolley Wes Rolley is an artist and concerned citizen. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
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