Lately I've been thinking that even by modern standards of insanity, the world is getting steadily crazier. Wherever I look these days, I see a never-ending display of the extremes of human endeavour; some of it agonizing, some of it impressive, and all of it head-shakingly bewildering, even to a cynical dog like me.
What's really alerted me lately to the complete madness of modern humanity is the feat of two young kids: the (now) 17 year old Jessica Watson and the even younger 13 year old Jordan Romero. I'd been paying scant attention to Jessica's solo, unassisted sail around the world since she left on her voyage in October of last year, but it was hard to avoid the hoopla when she recently completed the job, thus becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe single-handed when she sailed into Sydney Harbour on May 15, a few days short of her 17th birthday. The record is currently being disallowed by various organisations that control these sorts of thing on technical grounds (not enough kilometres sailed or because she's under 18, for example), but that doesn't really detract from her achievement, which is undeniably impressive.
Yet I still think it's insane.
How young do record holders have to be now to impress us and where does it end? I can imagine there's a 12 year old out there somewhere who'd be quite capable of sailing solo around the world, but should we let them? The ethical and moral issues will keep people arguing forever more, but I have to wonder how we ever reached that point in the first place and why we feel the need to keep pushing the boundaries of pointless activity.
But here's the really bizarre thing: just a few days ago Jordan Romero, at age 13, became the youngest person ever to ascend Mt. Everest. Without doubt that's a brilliant effort, but some 4,000 people have now made that climb to the top of the world and according to the news report I read, conditions at the time of Jordan's climb were sufficiently good to allow a whopping 49 people to make it to the top. What really struck me about it though was that to reach the summit the climbers had to step over, walk past, or pass within sight of over 100 bodies of climbers who had previously died making the same attempt. Which leaves me wondering what would be going through young Jordan's mind as he negotiated all that.
The people who succeed in these quests return as heroes: widely applauded, they make successful films about their efforts, write books, appear on chat shows, have blogs written about them and do the speaking circuit for years on the back of what they've achieved.
And yet... if they die in the attempt, we just leave their bodies on the mountain as if it didn't matter, and probably don't even report it in the news unless it's a local or relatively famous climber. The effort required to recover the bodies would only inhibit the efforts of other climbers to reach the top, so they are left there, and the fact of so many bodies on the mountain seemingly does nothing to slow the express train of climbers wanting the glory of a successful assault on Everest. All up, there are now around 150 unrecovered bodies on the mountain.
Meanwhile, down at sea level it's a little different. Every time a solo sailor gets into a trouble, authorities are only too happy to send out a rescue team. But there's neartly always an outcry at the expense to the public of those rescues. And it's true that every year we spend a small fortune in rescuing lost and injured adventurers. Yet we treat as heroes those who succeed in their endeavours to do something remarkable at the limit of human capabilities, while condemning those who try, fail and have to be rescued.
What will it take to impress us next? A solo ascent of Everest without oxygen by a blind dwarf with no legs and multiple sclerosis? An unassisted sail around the planet by a 10 year old in an open dinghy? The madness really ought to stop.
Regrettably, madness seems to go hand in hand with all forms of endeavour - recently I've been reading about early 20th century industrialisation. One of the heroes of that era was the German chemist Fritz Haber, a Nobel laureate whose work with nitrogen enabled fertiliser to be made so inexpensively that it has been claimed the world's population in the year 2000 was nearly double what it would have been had it not been for Haber's work.
It's ironic then, and tragic in the extreme that Haber was also directly and enthusiastically responsible for the chlorine gas used by the Germans in the trenches of World War I, and a later version of it was used by the Nazis in the extermination camps of the second world war.
But as horrific as that was, here's the real madness... Haber was a Jew.
And what's the connection with our two kids? Well, not a lot really, except to illustrate that in any field of human endeavour, the point of it seems inevitably to become lost, or at best distorted, and used for the wrong reasons with sometimes fatal consequences.
Which explains, I think, the inevitability of the global financial crisis; of BP's little soiree in the Gulf of Mexico, and countless other disasters and disappointments. All of which would be avoidable but for the human condition, which is to push the boundaries of everything we ever do, and which we do almost unconsciously as soon as something proves successful. Despite the media's penchant for bad news, we rarely see a balanced view of dangerous undertakings. The general media portrayal of Mount Everest isn't one of unclaimed bodies littering the upper slopes, but of accolades and wealth for those who safely return. An ambitious 13-year-old mountaineer scanning the available resources will find far more reasons for pushing himself to climb the thing than not. Which leads to the situation of children stepping over bodies to achieve their so-called dream.
So, this insanity continues to build. The whole planet seems to be imbued with the spirit of a destructive imp; building a fine mansion, only to pull it down in a cloud of dust and rubble as it is finally finished. Or worse still, a collapsed oil rig on the ocean floor, and a gushing torrent of oil spewing forth at 800,000 litres a day, there to remind us that progress can come at a hideous cost if we don't exercise restraint.
Incidentally, Fritz Haber's wife Clara - herself a doctor of chemistry - killed herself at least in part because of her husband's weaponizing of chlorine gas. The despair at seeing talent so badly misused is of course, understandable. As would be a general malaise over a society subjected to similar horrors caused by financiers, petroleum companies, politicians and countless others looking to progress civilisation, but in doing so inflicting unendurable harm through zealousness and irresponsibility.
It's not madness, it's how some manage to sublimate the overwhelming desire to explore and wander. The madness lies in the hearts of those seek to make a competition of it or limit us all to staying put.
ReplyDeleteYou see, this once great nomadic species has overrun the planet and can wander no more, except up and down a narrow ribbon of bitumen every day. So some seek to escape the madness by running up that hill.
What's the next frontier for the eternal nomad? Space? But the Jessica Watson knockers and the occupational health and safety obsessives tell us we shouldn't be sociable on the internet, how are we going to get past them to space?
Don't let randonnee be the final frontier. Please.
As for Fritz Haber, so he's one of the bastards responsible for overpopulating the planet? Well, pure evil in my book. But madness? Just coincidence and action without thought for consequence, all of it. The human condition.
ReplyDeleteNone of us are mad, we simply go about our lives physically incapable of making ALL of the consequential connections, even just the "likely" ones. Right now, as the most influential motoring show on the planet is pushing the hydrogen economy, so that is the fuel source people will lobby their politicians for, there has been a bio breakthrough that means we don't need the hydrogen economy.
"Artificial" life was created in a lab, and in a few years they will be producing single-cellular organisms which will break down farm waste to oil. Farm waste left to rot produces methane in the same volume as the same amount of farm waste burned produces carbon oxides. Methane is 6 time as greenhouse active as CO2 Or, digested by artificial bacteria, we get crude oil and methane captured to provide boundless energy.
No crops grown to feed cars, no methane raising the temperature of the planet, no shortage of oil and the internal combustion engine converting oil into motion producing only water vapour and CO2 because the vetroleum isn't loaded with mineral compounds that produce all the nasty stuff. All using the existing infrastructure and at very little extra cost, plus a new product for farmers to sell.
Or hydrogen. Which needs energy to crack it from water, has to be liquified (energy), stored safely (nearly impossible) and is a hazard in crashes.
Will the occupational health and safety worriers evaluate the risk of "artificial life" in the environment as more dangerous than compressed hydrogen on every street corner? You betcha, they already are. That is madness.