PRINCETON, NJ — On the eve of 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.
And if you think that’s depressing, get a load of this.
I think:
Sometimes, it’s better not to think.
Ignorance, after all, is bliss and a little ignorance goes quite a long way, especially in this hyperspace, computer-chip information overload moment in time. A moment that is in perpetual fast-forward. Time, it seems, can scarcely keep up with itself.
On occasion, (every day, more or less), you find yourself overwhelmed by a compulsion to comprehend the things you cannot control which have complete control over you. Things like aging and illness and quantum space and the mysteries of compassion. For starters. The things that only poets understand, and who understands poets? What do they know? They’re poets for God’s sake. Each person, it seems, must ultimately develop a progressive inability to understand this world in which they suffer and survive. And maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is for the best. If the necessary miracles of evolution did not ensure an innate ignorance, anarchy would ensue. If people understood that, for instance, the dust particles that annoyingly had to be cleaned every so often were primarily microscopic flakes of dead skin, or all those germs that thrived in elevators and restrooms and pay phones, or second-hand smoke and car exhaust, what our collective assault on the ozone layer was doing, think of all the would-be Robinson Crusoes, setting sail for the deserted islands that no longer exist. They simply aren’t there.
The future, as it always seemed to be, was at once exciting and intimidating to consider. And yet: thinking about the reality, the inevitability of the 21st century, it doesn’t seem altogether possible. Can’t we just slow things down a bit and grapple with the century that we let get away from us sometime back in the mid-to-late 1800’s? The Pony Express, the phone, then the phonograph, then pasteurization, planes, product assembly lines, proton bombs, Apartheid, All The President’s Men, politics as usual. Prosperity. Privation. Privacy. The Internet. Enough.
After a century of explosions—population, death, wealth, squalor, atomic, apathy, ethnic cleansing, e-mail—is there anything left to establish? Haven’t we already outdone ourselves? What does the new century, the future, the space age, have to dole out that we haven’t already discovered? What do we have to fear that doesn’t already stare us greedily in the face? After trench warfare, Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II, Hitler, Pol Pot and each subsequent dictator du jour, what is there, really, that can surprise us?
To be continued.
I think.
