Evolution in the Microwave: Silver Linings Playbook, Part Two

Many years ago, I found myself teaching at the University of California, San Diego. It was a good time. The students were exceptional (in a few cases, extraordinary), the weather was to die for, our kids were young, and the surfers trying to change in and out of their wet-suits along Highway 101 provided Leslie with regular entertainment while driving down to pick me up after class.

Ex-CIA chief George Herbert Walker Bush was President. Democrats could despise him without losing sleep. Corruption stayed in its channel.

I recalled those halcyon days while drinking my coffee on the terrace recently, not just because the weather here is the opposite of San Diego’s, or because our political situation would have been flat-out inconceivable then, but because I remembered talking to my students about something the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (who wasn’t late then), called “punctuated equilibrium.”

Hang with me here – it all ties together, sort of, in the end.

Gould’s theory (borne out by the fossil record) was that while life on earth generally evolved slowly, over endless eons, now and then, because of some extraordinary pressure, it went into overdrive. Think of the board game Candyland, in which you move step by step until a particular card shoots you twenty moves ahead. Punctuated equilibrium, according to Gould, was that card - evolution temporarily shoved in the microwave.

Parallels between the natural world and human society are always dangerous (scientists in their lab coats will rightly rise up and beat you over the head with their clipboards), but as my recent header into the boulder pool demonstrates, I’m a man of danger, so I’ll risk it.

I think we’re experiencing the political equivalent of punctuated equilibrium. After 250 years of relative stability (the bloody trial of the Civil War being the obvious exception), our flawed but functioning democracy is undergoing a period of extraordinary stress. To take just one example, not since 1798 (not even during the Civil War, or the worst of the McCarthy era), has the 1^st Amendment right to free speech come under serious attack. And yet this administration is now attacking the 1^st Amendment on a weekly basis.

We’ve drawn the card. We’re all in the microwave now.

How we’ll come out of it is the question.

My contention, my hope – fine, my possibly delusional dream – is that this assault, which has shaken us to the core, will also shake something radically new into being. A much-overdue realignment. A top-to-bottom interrogation of all the givens, all the things we’ve been told are decided and done. A reassessment of the miseries and failed promises and institutionalized injustices we’ve learned to accept as normal.

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Tremendous stress can inspire dramatic change. Systemic change. Already the Trump assault is forcing new realities into being.

Consider the epidemic of American isolation and loneliness about which so much has been written these past few years, an epidemic that has been growing since at least the 1950’s, when studies like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Robert and Helen Lind’s seminal Middletown, first sounded the alert. As civil society atrophied and mass corporate culture took over an ever-greater chunk of daily life, Americans began to retreat into their own private worlds, a migration accelerated enormously by the technological ‘advances’ of the last thirty years.

That migration had (and continues to have), political repercussions. Bunkered up, consuming a steady diet of curated news designed to confirm our assumptions, not challenge them, cushioned by layers of mediating technologies capable of providing us with everything, all the time, we drifted away from the natural world, our communities, even the silent precincts of our own imagination.

Increasingly alone, the outside world began to seem alien, then threatening.

Trumpism, in large part, was the result.

Yet now, the Trump administration, by virtue of its crudity, its violence, its blitzkrieg assault on America, is single-handedly reversing our migration indoors, forcing us to re-engage. To act. Not just on social media, but in actual time, actual space.

Americans are picking up their neighbors’ kids. They’re going grocery shopping for each other. They’re distributing buckets of whistles at bars and supermarkets. Americans are marching in sub-zero weather, supporting each other, helping each other, talking to each other.

Nothing lifts the soul as profoundly as doing something for someone else. It’s a powerful drug - you instantly feel good about yourself, proud of yourself – and once you’ve had a hit, you want more.

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But let’s run with this. Is it possible that this shock to the system might actually succeed in shaking the system? I believe it is.

I can easily imagine the ever-deepening moral rot and imperious self-dealing of the Epstein crowd triggering a cleansing spasm of revulsion – and not just for the grotesques in our own government but for the transnational mega-rich in all their plush arrogance and unaccountability.

It would make sense, after all, that a period of extraordinary decadence would usher in an Age of Accountability. That we’d come to see many of the inequities we live with as imposed from outside, engineered by a system that’s moved eighty trillion dollars from the bottom 90% to the top 1% over the past fifty years and convinced us it was just. It would even make sense that, with our equilibrium effectively punctuated, we’d wake up to the gilded knee on our throat and realize that virtually every problem we face could be addressed tomorrow by tapping the vaults of the super-rich, and that tapping those vaults would require nothing more than a slight tweak to the tax code, which is as man-made as a toaster and therefore, adjustable. (A tweak that would have to be accompanied by the plugging of every loophole, then enforced with an iron fist, but you get the drift.)

Is it utopian to imagine Trump and Musk and Bezos, et al., being forced to pay their fair share of taxes?

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Almost exactly 75 years ago, just as the Cold War was revving up, the American novelist William Faulkner gave a Nobel acceptance speech in which he dared to imagine that because man “had a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance,” he would not only endure, but prevail.

In my better moments, I imagine the same for us, though it occurs to me that what Faulkner left out is that sometimes the will to prevail requires a kick in the ass.

We’re getting that beating now.

Let’s hope it has the right effect.

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