Hunting for Hope by Scott Russell Sanders

Author:Scott Russell Sanders [Sanders, Scott Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6322-4
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1998-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Before the celebration, though, a caution: if we practice our skills without foresight or compassion, we’re headed for trouble—as individuals and as a species. No sooner do we learn how to smelt iron than we begin forging swords. We capture the explosion of gasoline in cylinders to drive horseless buggies and before long we’re smothering the earth with pavement and filling the air with smog. We split the atom and build a bomb. Every time we unriddle another disease, we burden the planet with more hungry mouths to feed and more itchy minds to satisfy. Now we’re monkeying with genes, and who knows what troublesome creatures we may loose upon the scene? Many of the nightmares about the future that ruin the sleep of my students and my children could be traced back to our blundering cleverness in manipulating the world.

Once young people begin to notice how often we misuse our ingenuity—to increase the levels of nicotine in cigarettes, to make handguns more lethal, to poison wolves, to fill our airwaves with trash—they may grow discouraged by our potential for mischief. I certainly felt discouraged when I was Jesse’s age, or Eva’s. After a childhood infatuation with science, when I believed that whatever we figured out how to do we should blithely do, I came to feel that the earth would be far better off if we Forgot every trick we knew. It seemed to me, in my late teens and early twenties, during my years of dawning political and ecological awareness provoked by the Vietnam War, that our whole civilization, the sum of all those skills laboriously acquired and passed on through the ages, had culminated in napalm, B-52S, electronic bingo, flip-top beer cans, water skis, alligator-skin shoes, and soap operas. Other species would heave a sigh of relief, I figured, if we all retreated to our rooms and sat very still and did nothing for a long while.

I’ve never been any good at doing nothing, however. So I finished college, married Ruth, went off to graduate school in England, where I read mind-changing books, agitated against the war, marched in support of sundry causes, scoured a good many spiritual traditions for guidance, then came back to start a job in America, where I began teaching young people who were as eager and baffled as I had ever been, and by and by I helped give birth to a child. More than anything else, Eva’s arrival hauled me out of my funk. How could I gaze into those brand-new eyes in the delivery room of a hospital, surrounded by deft people and cunning machines, and think that all our ingenuity is for naught? How could I dismiss as evil all those inventions that would ease my daughter’s way through life?

Of course, our power to manipulate the world is neither wholly benign, as I thought in my childhood, nor wholly destructive, as I thought for a spell in early adulthood, but rather, like most human powers, a mixed blessing. The

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