Читать книгу Out of Our Minds - Робинсон Кен - Страница 13

In December 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave his second annual address to Congress. He was writing one month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and in his message he urged Congress to see the situation they faced with fresh eyes. He said this: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”6

I love the word “disenthrall.” We all live our lives guided by ideas to which we are devoted but which may no longer be true or relevant. We are hypnotized or enthralled by them. To move forward we have to shake free of them. Over the past few centuries of industrialism, more and more people have moved off the land into cities and seem to believe that they can live apart from the rest of nature. The climate crisis reminds us that we cannot. In most respects, we are like most other organisms on earth. Our lives are brief; we pass through the same cycle of mortality from conception to birth to death; we have the same physical needs as other species and we depend on nutrients that the earth supplies.

“We may not be able to predict the future but we can help to shape it.”

Biologically, we are probably evolving at the same rate as other species, culturally, we are evolving at a uniquely furious rate. The cultural lives of dogs and cats are not changing that much. They seem to do pretty much what they’ve always done. There’s no need to keep checking in with them to see what’s new. In human life, there is always something new and the pace of change is quickening every day. The reason is that, in one respect at least, we human beings are different from the rest of life on earth. We have powerful imaginations and unlimited powers of creativity. In imagination we can visit the past, and not just a single view of the past. We can review and reinterpret the past. We can enhance our sense of the present by seeing with other people’s eyes. We can anticipate possible futures and we can act creatively to bring them about. We may not be able to predict the future, but we can help to shape it.

It may be that some of the challenges we are creating, in the natural environment, in politics and in our conflicting beliefs, will overcome us, and maybe sooner rather than later. If so, it will not be because we have made too much use of our imaginations but too little. Now, more than ever, we need to exercise these unique creative powers that make us human in the first place. The challenges we face are global and personal. As this is my book, let’s start with me.