The Invisible Pyramid by Loren Eiseley

Author:Loren Eiseley [Eiseley, Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781598535464
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

II

“Every man,” Thoreau once recorded in his journal, “tracks himself through life.” Thoreau meant that the individual in all his reading, his traveling, his observations, would follow only his own footprints through the snows of this world. He would see what his temperament dictated, hear what voices his ears allowed him to hear, and not one whit more. This is the fate of every man. What is less well known is that civilizations, which are the products of men, are in their way equally obtuse. They follow their own tracks through a time measurable in centuries or millennia, but they approach the final twilight with much the same set of postulates with which they began. In Ruth Benedict’s words, they resemble a human personality thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic features and a long time span.

Of these personalities the most intensely aggressive has been that of the West, particularly in the last three centuries which have seen the rise of modern science. When I say “aggressive,” I mean an increasingly time-conscious, future-oriented society of great technical skill, which has fallen out of balance with the natural world about it. First of all, it is a consumer society which draws into itself raw materials from remote regions of the globe. These it processes into a wide variety of goods which a high standard of living enables it to consume. This vast industrial activity, in turn, enables the scientist and technologist to take command of business.

Scientists are not necessarily rich or the owners of business. The process is more subtle. With the passage of time and the growth of the urban structure, funds for research and development take up a far greater proportion of the budget of a particular industry. So long as the industry is in competition with others, it cannot afford to cling for long to a particular industrial process because of the fear that rival technicians will develop something more attractive or cheaper. The drive for miniaturization in the computer industry is a case in point. Thus the laboratory and its priesthood take an increasing share of the profits as they become a necessity for business survival. They also intensify the rate of social change which contributes both to human expectations and the alienation between the generations. Advertising becomes similarly important in order to encourage the acceptance of the new products as they are made available to the public. National defense is swept into the same expensive pattern in the technological war for survival.

In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the oncoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is “progress.” What we seek, in the end, is Utopia. In the endless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present. We are the greatest producers of non- degradable garbage on the planet. In the cities a winter snowfall quickly turns black from the pollutants we have loosed in the atmosphere.

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