The Nomadic Alternative – Page 4

Total extinction is one of the few fresh experiences left for all

to share.

Few applaud the consequences of man's appetite for novelty, but

assume the calamities attendant on his progress to be the inevitable

result of that progress, and progress itself to obey some evolution-

ary bias akin to natural selection. If perhaps the doctors of the

mind could produce a universal vaccine for the virus of restlessness,

all might yet be saved. But to date it has proved incurable.

The student of animal behaviour will agree with Pascal on our

need for distraction. Progress is an innate disposition in man and

answers laws inherent in his nature. The human animal is the inventor

of its own problems. Other animals, when young, learn, explore, play

and fight to orientate themselves to each other and their surround-

ings. Scientists have observed that if young rats are isolated and

deprived of the opportunity to learn, they never come to maturity

but flail about with their mental and neural faculties permanently

impaired. Later in life the juvenile curiosity wanes.

But the human animal is a perpetual juvenile perpetually bored.*

Its young fertile brain never tires of playing hide and seek with

itself, of asking questions and answering them, of innovating and

improvising as it gropes with childlike envy for the new. Divine

discontent propels it to escape the complications of the present

and dream of a future with all its problems solved. The reward of

a scientist is to be the first to prove a hypothesis; the reward

of an engineer to invent a new toy; and the reward of a hypochon-

driac to recover from a disease of his own imagination. The politi-

cian at the apex of power is simply playing the "I'm the King of

the Castle" game - just like a young goat. Men climb mountains

"because they are there"; and to quote an astronaut, they fly to

the Moon "because this is what man has always done". The quest

for knowledge or any creative endeavour is a hunt through a dark

night of uncertainty. The quarry is the solution to a problem. But

the quarry is fleet of foot and never tires, and the hunter tires

and is mortal.

*This concept of the infancy of man is known as 'neoteny' - the

process by which we have become younger and more open to the world.