SEPTEMBER 6 2015
THOUGHTLESSNESS
In one of her book Hannah Arendt describes the concept of thoughtlessness, the failure to gauge the consequences of one’s actions. She wonders whether this is the root of all evil.
Perhaps she is right. It reminds me of the Garden of Eden which the Bible sees as the beginning of history and the origin of sin with Adam and Eve eating that fateful
piece of fruit. Had this human pair really gauged its disastrous consequences, now imperiling our entire earthly existence through Climate Change, perhaps they would have acted different.
I was thinking about that this week because I had a rather unique experience these last few days. For this I have to go back 40 years.
In 1975 our family, upon my insistence, moved from urban St.Catharines, Ont., to rural Tweed, midway between Ontario’s two principal cities, Toronto and Ottawa, each approximately 200 km away. Actually my story goes back even further, also connected to my topic of “Thoughtlessness”. That year was 1944 and as a 16 year old I still can picture myself in front of a corner store – a tobacconist- shuttered, of course, because there were no tobacco products for sale anymore. During the war in occupied the Netherlands cigarettes, if you had them, were worth their weight in gold. Nevertheless there I learned how to smoke. My friend, the eldest son of our family doctor, only a week younger than I, was puffing a cigarette, stolen from his father. He was smoking rings, which intrigued me and I wanted to try it as well. I did and that launched my smoking addiction, except that in those days smoking was seen as a manly thing. My father was a confirmed smoker and because he had lots of stuff to barter, was never short of cigarettes and cigars ever during the war. It was not hard for me to filch more than the odd one.
Fast forward to 1959, 15 years later and now well settled in Canada. One of my clients was dying – I then operated an insurance agency- and when I saw how he no longer ate or drank, but till his last breath smoked, I decided to quit my a pack-a-day-addiction. It was thoughtlessness that got me into the smoking habit – my father died of lung cancer – while my friend who was my accomplice in acquiring the habit, is also long gone. I see it as providence that made me quit. Instead I took up running, a so-called positive addiction, which I still do until this day.
I was reminded of all that this week when a pole that carries the wires that bring electricity to our house, snapped right at the point where it enters the earth. At a 70 degree angle it was leaning against a tree and the heat of the transformer caused the beginning of a fire there. I saw it happen at 2.30 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I called 911 and the Tweed voluntary fire force came out with three trucks and they called Hydro One, just 2 km down the road. The hydro people too appeared with 2 trucks and quickly disconnected me from the grid by removing the transformer. Since the pole was on my property it became my responsibility to call a contractor to remove the broken pole and insert a new one. Both my phone and my internet were affected, so I had to go to a neighbor for this. The Ontario Hydro crew gave me a number to call, which turned out to be a wrong one. So it wasn’t until the next day that I located a firm able to so this.
That all happened on Tuesday September 1. On Friday morning a crew came to replace the pole, but another complication arose. Forty years ago, in 1975, I planted some 4000 trees in that same area where the wire connection is between our house and the highway. These trees were tiny when I planted them, but I never looked up, taking that overhead wire into consideration. Basically this was a matter of Thoughtlessness. So I had to engage a firm to cut a corridor through that pine forest because no power would be provided until that was done.
So how did we manage having no electricity for four days? Actually very well. Thanks to some foresight, the opposite of Thoughtlessness, I had, years ago, installed a winterized water pump over my wellhead. Winterized means that there is some four feet of air before the water is reached, something necessary in our neck of the woods where the frost at times goes as deep as 4 feet. So we had water, an important ingredient of human life.
Another, equally important feature was that we had solar panels and fairly new batteries so we had lighting, TV and enough power to boil water, make coffee in our house, and have the slow cooker prepare our oats. That was another good thing. A few years ago I had converted my office – a separate building- into a guest house, so, when our children come – they all live far away – they have separate lodging. There we have a propane-fired stove where we could cook our own meals, which we did in great comfort.
Years ago I bought a small freezer to accommodate the extra food we needed to overwinter. That one is connected to the solar panels. There was enough space there to store all our frozen items. Thank God.
Thoughtlessness is the key to our demise as the human race, something that started in the Garden of Eden. Take the Greenhouse effect, as it was called in the initial stages. A Swedish chemist by the name of Arrhenius wrote in 1906, thus 109 years ago, that if the concentration of Greenhouse Gases would double, the average temperature of planet Earth would rise by 5-6 degrees Celsius. Then it was less than 280ppm of CO2. Now it exceeds 400, not quite double but well on the way. We were certainly forewarned, but we did not listen. When coming November the world meets in Paris to discuss Climate Change we will hear all sorts of dire predictions and governments will make solemn promises, and, if history is any guide, all these promises will be broken because immediate needs, such as the pursuit of economic growth, and the pledge to provide employment, will have priority.
A dry run
To me the episode this past week is a dry run for the time when some powerful natural event will inconvenience us in North America so much that we will be forced to
live off the grid for an extended time. Our total way of life is one borrowed from the future and there will come a time, perhaps soon, where there is nothing more to borrow. To me it is an omen, and reminds me of what Joseph Conrad wrote in his Typhoon. There it says: Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door.
To me there is a lesson here. Thanks to some foresight – the opposite of thoughtlessness – we weathered this small crisis well, and it made me realize the preciousness of water. For four days I went back to the old-fashioned way where every drop of water had to be carried into the house, to flush the toilets, to make tea and coffee and prepare meals.
Also for four days we had no access to telephone and Internet. We did have TV and radio, so we were not completely cut off from the world. The absence of Internet and the news sources there – I usually spent an hour each day to read various papers and blogs – gave me more time to finish the book I am translating which deals with Revelation, the last Bible book. That has been an intense job: 70 days of 5-6 hours of thinking, writing, erasing, re-arranging, while also receiving a thorough education in what Johan Herman Bavinck, a celebrated Professor of Mission Studies at the Free University of Amsterdam, once wrote.
Transposing his words from Dutch into contemporary English gave me good insight into the matters that deal with the Last Days. The more I re-interpret his words into the language of the world, the more I am convinced that we live in the Last Days. These last days – I think today – will be preceded by some terrible happenings, and when we watch TV and see what happens in the Middle East, the cradle of civilization, then for a large part of the world these terrible happenings are already taking place. Many parts of Africa are now inhabitable, due to drought, overgrazing and overpopulation. The deserts there are expanding rapidly and so is the population. Soon there will be some 200 million excess people in Africa alone, converging into cities where there is no work and no housing. What we have seen so far at the edges of Europe is only the very beginning.
Turmoil is also happening in the USA. A few days ago the New York Times reported that the murder rates in US cities are skyrocketing for the same reason: no work, no opportunities, no decent housing and too many guns.
Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of the Revelation book that I finished translating this past week.
But what is sure beyond doubt is that humanity will be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest: in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all constrains humanity has enforced upon it, as it will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, and pandemics, more severe than ever.
An integral part of this will be the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and brutality never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. And all this will result in the kingdom of the world-tyrant, the Rule of the Antichrist, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising from within the community of nations.
Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity will not turn to God, will only become more outspoken in its resistance to the Christian religion, more spiteful in its condemnation, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, the unjust will become more so; the vile will simply pursue more vileness: the masks will fall off, and the true nature of everything will be revealed.
Yes, what will become quite clear in the last days is that the real object for this new situation is to lay bare the true nature of everything and everybody. In this very last human empire that is coming into being, all hidden forces that have dominated the world’s history from times immemorial will be there for all openly to see in its minutest detail. In other words: sin will be revealed in its full sense of the word, in its breathtaking hubris, in its self-elevation to God’s throne, in its all-out discarding of everything that stands in the way of exercising power. All our vilest intentions will rise to the surface; all veneer will vanish, and melt away in the heat of evil evident in the last days. Humanity, not as single persons but as the human race in its totality, as a collective species, will unite in its secular dream to form a totalitarian world empire, lauding its greatness and power. This state will only have one idol….the Antichrist, the culmination of the world’s history.
All the signs are there already. Our artificial world, now tottering under the mountain of monetary and environmental debt, will soon collapse through a series of disasters, all man-made.
Once this evil empire has run its course, Christ’s Kingdom will come where everything will be as it is.
That is the ultimate consequence of the ‘thoughtlessness’ that started in the Garden of Eden. Indeed it looks like the original sin.