The Tide of Time

On the way home from Macbeth on Saturday afternoon, the Metro was flooded with people leaving the People's Climate March. There were middle-aged and young people and couples with children, holding cardboard signs supporting environmental policies and protection against climate change, etc., etc.

All signs suggest that it is too late and the earth is on an irreversible course of climate change that will bring warmer temperature, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. Whether these changes spell doom for agriculture and the human society as a whole, there is no reliable economic model to predict. Obviously, this is no reason to stop the effort to curb carbon emission and other types of pollution, but we're kidding ourselves if we believe that we can still turn the tide back to the world of yesterday, even 50 to 70 years ago.

Ironically, millions upon millions of people are still treating climate change as a pure political issue or a conspiracy created by liberals. This stance will continue until their crops fail in scorching droughts and their homes get swallowed in floods and hurricanes.

My mind made a turn and connected climate change with the three witches with prophetic power. It is curious how Macbeth selectively hears and believes the parts of their prophecies he likes and discards the parts that troubles him. We all do this, and we can't help ourselves. If we could put aside all the killings he commits and orders, Macbeth is just another Oedipus Rex. While the orthodoxy considers Macbeth's fate as a result of his own character flaws (greed, ambition, cruelty, megalomania) with a dash of justice, I wonder if it's a lost child of the ancient Greek's mythology, which attributes human fortune to the fickleness of the gods. We only seem to be a creature of cause and effect and we only seem to control our lives via our choices and actions.

Like the pessimistic projection of climate change based on already-collected data, the hypothesis that free will does not objectively exist is also based on some hard-to-dispute scientific evidence, starting with Special Relativity and including the vastness of the unconscious. This is not to say that free will, as a subjective phenomenon, does not operate in the human mind, much like the functions of perception or emotion or cognition. Nevertheless, we probably do not cause or control our realistic lives nearly as consciously and as freely as we would like to believe.

When we think about history, the conventional habit is to trace the cause and effect of significant events to powerful kings and queens and presidents, and their personalities and relationships and competence. The Wars of Roses went on for decades because, see, Henry V died too young, leaving an infant son who was unable to control the factions of his court. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved before we met annihilation because JFK was a smart guy, or maybe he had a really smart brother to help him, or Khruschev was more reasonable than Americans know. We attribute historical events and trends to human motives and reasons. Maybe GW Bush wanted to show his father he was a good son, or maybe his friends wanted to make a few more billions of dollars in profit. Whatever.

But, imagine if you were an alien observing humans like we humans observe ants or plants. You see patterns, some of which are cyclic and some are linear or spiral. Would you give a damn about the motive of each significant event? If you see the species as a whole go to war with each other every 5 to 10 years, or continually, would you give a damn what the human motive is behind each war? If you see the human society obsessively strips its natural environment with increasing efficiency, do you really need to hear their rationalization?

Can we help ourselves? Macbeth can't.