On Optimism

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Racket readers may have noticed I’ve been quiet. I’ve been preparing a speech for the Rescue the Republic event in Washington this Sunday. It seems I may not be given enough time to deliver this address, but no matter what the whole text, now about something broader than censorship, will appear here Sunday.

Last night, after finally finishing a draft, I took my wife and children to The Sphere in Las Vegas. For those who haven’t seen, it’s a wild, absurd, awesome invention, a giant pixelated Pac-Man containing the world’s largest LED screen and a “4D” theater accessed inside via a Guggenheim-esque system of criscrossing balconies. We watched “Postcard from Earth,” a Koyaanisqatsi-style compilation of natural and human scenes edited into a visual roller-coaster, with young and old gasping as for instance an African bull elephant appears to stomp on the shaking theater.

The movie is excellent for what it’s designed to accomplish, but I found myself bristling a little (a very little) at the script, which depicts two people forced to explore other planets because we destroyed this one. There are scenes of old structures buried under weeds or sand, with a voice-over warning:

The implication is we never noticed the fleeting nature of human grandeur and continued to build temples to ourselves, oblivious to the state of our true temple, mother earth. In the climactic scene earth groans to try to “shake us off” and the audience is shown a battery of floods, fires, hurricanes and graves.

My first thought was to chuckle, “I guess the Evel Knievel era is over!” The point of Vegas used to be to get audienes so adrenaline-wired they wouldn’t notice blowing their savings at the tables. Here I saw a little girl a few rows below whispering to Mom, “We’re gonna die?” Thought #2: It’s not true! People always looked at ruins as warnings. Shelley looked at “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” and recorded the boast of Ozymandias, King of Kings: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But we kept building, breeding, and exploring because we’re just like the fish and sharks and wild horses whose raw animal energy the film lauded, wired to live to the hilt, not to not die. Building temples and opera-houses and works of art are the closest we get to immortality. Who can blame us for reaching?

It’s become fashionable in the age of scientific portent to chide humanity for its conquest of nature. Film sequences routinely render human settlements as a mindless overgrowth, an invasive menace like lantern-flies or zebra mussels. We should have known our place, been comfortable with less. Please. We’ve had antibiotics for less than a hundred years, and everyone from peasants to the very rich were likely to know the agony of a lost child. Until 1900 the survival rate past five years for all children was 57%, and only 30% of babies made it to a second birthday. Most people in most places suffered. But residents of the 21st century think we should look back at the aqueducts or La Sagrada Familia or the Hoover Dam or whatever as gloating selfies posed in front of earth heaving on her sick bed.

Species guilt is a strange thing to ask of a visitor to a $2 billion digital tennis ball in a desert resort town built by gangsters. I think people are amazing. We had other problems before and figured those out. Now we have new ones, and we’ll do it again. Mope less, live more! And have a good weekend, everyone.