Natural Orientation

Today nearly everyone is focused on living in the present. Presence is the place and state of mind in which many people want to be at all times.

That may very well be all good and fine, but still we should also keep in mind our orientation. Orientation is a word with very strong connotations. If there is such a thing as “originally“, then I guess it originally meant something like “facing eastwards”. Because it plays a significant role in many religions, it also has the corresponding religious connotations.

Yet the orientation I have in mind is whether we use our outlook from the present towards the future or towards the past. To me, it seems quite ironic that most scientific orientations look towards the past. The basic idea of science, after all, is that things will probably continue to happen in the future the way they have always happened in the past, and therefore if we analyze the observations from the past then we may be able to “predict the future” (I put that in quotes to pay homage to a scientist who has had a great influence on much of my own thinking — E.F. Schumacher, who published a series of essays a little over half a century ago, one of these essays being titled “A Machine to Predict the Future” [1] ).

Several decades ago I was very prone to alert many people I came into contact with that humans are the only species so far to produce vast quantities of plastic and nuclear waste. Try looking either of those processes up in some kind of historical tome that does not involve humanity! [2]

Focusing in a little more on humanity, let’s consider for a moment what motivates the actions we humans tend to get engaged in. For most humans, I guess, we are motivated by something like “optimization” of the rest of our lives. In general, thinking about the past seems like a waste of time. Our natural inclination is indeed even more future-oriented insofar as our own level of satisfaction is influenced by the level of satisfaction of our offspring. In many countries, it seems as if that “offspring-bonus” towards future orientation is currently waning — one might even argue: to an unsustainable degree.

Yet what I myself find most worrisome is an overall trend over the past few centuries, I think first succinctly identified by the historian Fredric Jackson Turner (which is now commonly referred to as Turner’s “Frontier Hypothesis”) — that the freedom experienced anywhere is the result of a frontier, which extends beyond civilization’s borders. In particular, I would argue that there is corollary to this frontier hypothesis, namely that the freedom experienced on the frontier usually leads humans to increase the rate of extinction there above the average rates of extinction at which humans destroy the natural environments surrounding what they call “home”.

[1] See the quite cheap paperback book titled “Small is Beautiful” (or also copies of it available online — see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful )

[2] Obviously, I am focusing on our so-called natural habitat, commonly referred to as “Earth”. I have very little idea what happens on other planets and / or other so-called “celestial bodies”