Artwork by Autumn Riddle
Somebody has said old age is another country. But what does that mean, "another country"? Anyone who has traveled knows what it's like to be in a foreign land that is, and yet is not, the same as the one they are familiar with. Buildings, streets, and street life, mothers with strollers, all of that and more looks a lot like home. And yet it doesn't. It's not just the language that's different (even if it's the same one spoken in one's own nation) or the food or cars. One has the confusing sense of being in a place at once the same and yet different, and more to the point, unanticipated, even unimaginable despite one's having read dozens of novels describing the scenes one is now confronting with amazement, delight, and even some anxiety.
When I was in my 60s, I wrote an essay called "An Elders Manifesto." I thought I was old then, or at least close enough to old age to be able to describe what it was like with some authority. The essay has held up pretty well. I had identified the attitude of the young (anyone under 50) toward what we quaintly call "senior citizens." I had also talked about how the old interiorize the young's attitude toward them: socially superfluous, emotionally and mentally hangers-on, a burden and responsibility, everything but fellow countrymen in life's journey.
And yet I did not 20 years ago—could not—see and know what I know now. Now it's as if I were gazing down on reality from high above, thousands of feet up, while simultaneously seeing it at ground level and parts in between. From a distance, one observes connections—how the valleys slope into highlands, how desert lies shockingly right next to jungle. The first astronauts experienced something similar when they viewed earth, the "big blue marble," in its fragile context of black space, or when we ourselves look at images of our planet from a probe that has reached the edges of the solar system: a white dot in an immensity of nothingness.
How does one go about describing one's experience of the unexperienced? It's like being a child again when one's parents take us to a new place, a place that looks so different from the only one we knew until then. Who could imagine there were mile-wide rivers if one has never seen anything broader than a stream? Who knew the landscape could rise all the way to the sky, its peaks enveloped by clouds, if one had grown up on a prairie—never mind the first sight of an ocean if one has never seen anything bigger than a lake?
Of course, one doesn't wake up one morning and suddenly see everything from the broad and layered perspective of old age. It happens in stages, gradually, insensibly, until the mist rises, the curtains part, the screen widens, and one sees the bigger picture: a wide landscape only now understood in this larger and deeper context, three-dimensionally, though not many years earlier we believed what we saw then was the big picture, or at least as big as it was going to get. It's as if we are on a long journey, and partway through we look out the window of the car or train and see flat farmland, doze off for a while and wake up to find the view has become rolling hills with tall mountains on the horizon. The view and, more importantly, the context, the gestalt, has enlarged beyond what we could have imagined. Of course, if we sleep through the journey, willingly or not, pass through the Rockies unconscious and wake up to more farmland, we never suspect there is anything else.
But enough with metaphor. What actually was happening to me, at least on a conscious level, was more palpable. A couple decades of reading, attaining something like the education, especially in history, that did not occur in any classroom I had sat in, produced new perspectives. And almost always the new views were contradictions of the accepted narratives.
It started with a curiosity about the early history of Christianity. It was full summer, I was down with a virus, and I had trouble reading. I found I could monitor courses online, YouTube videos of actual classes in some of the more famous universities. It was shocking to find how many of those courses were dull and poorly taught. It was hard to believe a Yale or an NYU actually paid people to do little more than recite dates or regurgitate a received narrative. The early Christianity courses were hopeless and, in any case, all of the courses I investigated were really about teaching historical method (done by teaching-assistant graduate students outside class hours), making the actual subjects of any particular course all but superfluous and interchangeable. Content, never mind prospective or attempt to make sense of it in anything but a serial, rote manner, didn't seem to matter.
But the assigned readings in those YouTube videos, at least in one case, a book by a Dutch scholar with the daunting title of Scribal Culture in Ancient Israel, was an eye-opener. It's an historical narrative that gives perspective and context to the religion that preceded and followed it (Christianity for my purposes).
I was off and running. By chance I had discovered the context out of which the itinerant rabbi named Yehoshua (or Yoshua) ben Yusef was gradually transformed into Jesus the Christ by the Greeks and Romans. I came to see that religion and politics are joined at the hip. The Torah, or Old Testament, was the creation of the Jerusalem priesthood in the six century BC, and just like any other historical narrative, was used and revised and eventually declared complete and unalterable as it suited the scribes/editors when they copied and recopied it every generation, partly because that was more or less the life span of the papyrus they wrote on.
Maybe I should add that I had an interest in the Christian religion because I had spent more than 20 years a practicing Catholic, 16 of them in Catholic schools. I knew the narrative inside and out. When I was still in single digits, I not only could define the meaning of the word "transubstantiation," I could spell it. It took many decades, long after I stopped going to church, until the full consequences of that education became apparent to me. During those years I continued to feel guilt when I questioned the validity of its theology, just as I had been taught from early childhood that thinking the wrong thoughts could land me in eternal hellfire. Sometimes when I watched a lecture by a Biblical scholar like Bart Ehrman, I felt as if the Devil might be speaking, or speaking through him. I have always marveled at people who in their teens or early 20s "saw through" the myth they had been taught and put it permanently behind them.
The history of early Christianity turned out to be much like the history of any other new religion or organization that has withstood the test of time, full of infighting and power plays, with the losers being condemned and assigned to obscurity or silence through the deliberate destruction of their writings, and not infrequently put to death (many more Christians were killed by other Christians in those days than by the Roman empire). Three centuries passed between the death of Yoshua ben Yusef and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, now located in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. It had gone from a membership in the double digits to a majority of the population of the empire. If that seems like an improbable rate of growth, consider that the Mormon religion, founded in the early 19th century, has grown and continues to grow at the same rate.
During those three centuries, what had started out as a Jewish movement led by an itinerant rabbi from the obscure town of Nazareth, was converted in the hands of Greek-educated intellectuals into a theology that had little to do with the words of Yoshua/Jesus, who had more in common with Jewish sages who had preceded and followed him. Yoshua's own followers, led by his brother Yakov, "James," continued to follow their late rabbi's teachings for more than a century after his crucifixion, while in Egypt, Antioch, and other Greco-Roman parts of the Roman empire, the bare bones of that teaching, most reliably recorded in the Gospel written under the name of Mark, was taking shape as a form of neo-Platonism.
Saul/Paul of Tarsus, himself exposed to if not formally educated in the Greek tradition, a near contemporary of Yoshua/Jesus, laid the foundation for the theology that was to become Christianity. He caught hell from Yoshua/Jesus's family in Judea who were doing their best to preserve and practice the simple message of their next of kin. Saul/Paul was even summoned to Jerusalem to answer for the bizarre, un-Jewish notions he was espousing, all based on what he insisted was a personal interview with the risen Christ (Saul/Paul shows little interest in the man Jesus/Yoshua ben Yusef). He expected, or pretended to be, killed in Judea by disciples of Yoshua ben Yusef. But he was just given a strong dressing down and told to mend his ways. Later church "history" pretends that Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul joined forces and were later executed in Rome where their tombs are located right next to each other.
This investigation of the narrative I had been raised on was the beginning of what has since expanded into a study of not just Christianity but of all of Western history, and beyond. But knowledge, facts, are one thing, education is another. The 18th-century Enlightenment was just as important for me in that sense. There I discovered, at least in France, men who shared my own kind of upbringing, including a schooling by Jesuit priests. I feel a special affinity to Denis Diderot, who had both a brother a priest and a sister a nun (my own immediate family had three former seminarians). I admired Diderot's ability to make a complete break with his upbringing, while I continued deep into my 70s timidly confronting the terrors of my youth.
As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, most of us have trouble imagining a reality radically different from the one in which we have been immersed in our younger years. Again, who can envision an alternative to a landscape utterly different from the only one we have ever experienced? I have never seen the Rocky Mountains in person, but I have seen photographs of them, not to mention Westerns in which they play so prominent a part. Yet, if someone had told me such places existed, if I had been assured the landscape I knew were the only true one, and that even listening to tales of other landscapes was wrong (the existence of the antipodes, i.e., Australia, was once a heretical notion; did people there walk on their heads?), how would I deal with my first sight of those mountains, even in a photograph? The native people of Borneo, when they first made contact with "white" people, assumed their stool would be white, too. That's not just an amusing anecdote of a "primitive" people confronting "modern" ones. The Borneans are just as modern as we are, and react as anyone else would to a reality unlike anything they could imagine.
This is something like the view from the country of the old, or at least it has been for me. It has come together piecemeal, not on a conscious level, with books I read on history echoing lectures on bio-chemistry I watch online until I see they are really about the same thing, such as the origin of life or the nature of not just human but all life that is made out of the same kind of cell as ourselves, from mushrooms to talk-show hosts, which are virtually indistinguishable under a microscope. Why do people as well as animals and even plants all have to eat other living things to survive? The Judaeo-Christian explanation is sin, disobedience to the Creator's will. Okay, but why do vegetarian antelopes have to suffer and die for human sin?
It turns out that life-eating-life became necessary when mitochondria entered other one-cell organisms and developed a symbiotic relationship with those host cells serving as oxygen processors. Amazingly, this only happened once in the billions of years of evolution and fairly recently in that time frame. The new cell, called eukaryotic (a cell containing a nucleus) has an enormously enhanced energy compared with the cells that had preceded it. This energy is the result of its ability to use the combustible hydrogen processed by those mitochondria guest cells. But that kind of energy requires lots of high-quality fuel, which is only provided by the consumption of large amounts of other cells like themselves, organisms rich and concentrated in the required nutrients, whether that be pigs, insects, or spinach. A far cry from our one-celled ancestors, which could live off the minerals spewing out of deep-ocean geysers.
What caused this new perspective for me is the triangulation of this reflection of one area of knowledge with another: history with biochemistry in this case. Triangulation is a method of determining something's location by observing it from two different angles. If you want to locate the source of a radio transmission, you monitor it from two different angles, computing the degrees of angle of the two reception points and by doing so find out the origin of the transmission by using geometry every school child is taught: the sum of all three degrees of any triangle is 180 degrees.
I can't prove with that kind of accuracy the results of every such triangulation that occurs to me. But the sum total of them becomes a large canvas with subjects that once seemed independent of each other but are now interrelated and even essential to one another, like a great work of art. Sometimes, to my great delight, a new canvas emerges, even wider and deeper and more revealing than the sum of its parts.
Another factor involved in this is maturation, if I may use a word out of fashion nowadays, is the simple amount of time one has been alive and learning from experience. If one has lived for more than eight decades on this planet, the present starts to look a lot like a past one has personally lived through. One has seen the movie before. The plot is slightly altered, the cast of characters different, but the new version looks a lot like the one seen 40 or even 60 years ago, sometimes distressingly so.
I have tried to describe the broadest and certainly most comprehensive triangulation or synthesis that I have had in two essays "Reality" and "The Giraffe's Long Neck or Why Margaret Still Grieves." No essay can fully capture what I wanted to share, and I'm not a good-enough poet to do it justice. I'm also not unaware that the validity of the kind of vision I try to describe in those essays cannot not be taken on faith. Plenty of "clear and distinct ideas," to use Descartes's phrase, turn out to be pipe dreams. Joannes Kepler, a contemporary of Newton who also created the calculus needed to express new scientific theories that have stood the test of time. But one day during a class he was giving, it struck him that five simple equations could explain the most basic mysteries science was grappling with. He was never able to give up that obsession, however mistaken, though he still ranks at the very top of the geniuses of the last 500 years. Visions can be compelling to experience, but they can also be wrong.
On the other hand, if Newton didn't have an ah-ha! moment to convince him there was an invisible force causing objects, both near and at astronomical distances from each other, to move toward each other, we would not know the moon causes tides and that all the rest of the universe is full of the same force. Even so, we rely on that vision (which was validated by hard evidence with mathematical precision), even though we don't know much more about that attraction or "gravity," as we call it, and probably never will, though we can measure it down to the subatomic level. And it's worth noting Isaac Newton spent 90 percent of his time doing alchemy and looking for hidden messages in Holy Scripture. But unlike Descartes, who after establishing what we call the scientific method, resorted to reason alone, metaphysics, as proof for his theories, whether in optics or other areas, Newton ran physical experiments to prove his own hypotheses, a practice which we accept now as the essence of good science (however much we violate it in favor of "expert" opinion or "common sense").
Much of our thinking—even when "our" includes so-called experts, the authorities in universities and government agencies we rely on for our health and well-being—is Cartesian, by which I mean the assessment and treatment for medical and other issues may seem logical, what seems to obviously follow from the evidence, or even "common sense," but actually are half-truths based on more than is verifiable, as well as by politics and group think. We rely on such expert decision-making with the kind of blind faith intellectuals in previous centuries relied on priests, rabbis, and mullahs. Those authorities back then also believed they were "scientific" in their thinking. Is our own knowledge really based on anything more solid? We like to think it is. But we frequently decide what is good and what is bad science depending on who is presenting it. There is a movement in medicine, a shockingly recent one, aimed at making medicine evidence-based. It's appalling to find out how much of medical education is derived from "experts," taught and re-taught in medical schools and beyond with the authority of divine revelation. Until a study of what happens to patients who receive some invasive procedures (bypass surgery, stents, radical mastectomies) versus those who received less drastic treatments show no advantage in terms of longevity, not to mention the discomforts and dangers involved in using those interventions.
No less shocking is how much politics and simple cowardice drives even other areas essential to our well-being, world peace, genetics. Bucking the received "truth" takes as much courage as denying the existence of God did in the 13th century. Doing so can mean ostracizing and loss of employment, especially if done publicly.
Most of the world's scientists take global warming, or to be more precise, the agency of human activity contributing to global climate change, as a settled matter. Only, most of those learned men and women are not speaking from the position of those who do the basic work, the people who take the measurements underlying the conclusions. That evidence is used to create computer models entirely dependent on the data fed into them. Predicting probabilities always involves guesswork, even in the best science. We have believed in the past (some of us still do) that by genetic manipulation we can produce superior human beings. That belief was based on wishful thinking, not evidence. And yet "eugenics" is alive and well despite its being discredited 100 years ago following decades of support from most of the world's liberal, not conservative, scientists and public figures, many of whom are on the list of secular saints of the 20th century.
Human agency's contribution to global warming is based upon models created out of the evidence (and preconceptions) fed into computers. And yet, no issue I know of causes more arguments among laypeople than does this one. How many of those who teach the majority conclusion on this issue are shunned by their peers if they seriously question it, which about five percent of the scientific world does? And the side you come down upon, even if you are a professional, is a predictable indicator of how you vote: conservatives, "It's a hoax"; liberals, "It's a fact." I happen to think that, given the serious consequences of not taking the near-scientific consensus at face value, we should do what we can to limit global emissions. But I cannot speak from any personal knowledge of the science. Nor can most of those who take it for granted, even those who teach in universities and make public policy.
An assessment of how the Covid pandemic was handled provides yet another cautionary tale about what happens when we and our government rely on "expert opinion" and "common sense" over evidence and the collateral damage caused by doing so.
But that's a subject for another essay.
