edgar-mitchell

13
When I look back on the life I’ve lived so far, I see how it could be read
as a small-scale metaphor for the course Western civilization has taken
through the millennia. That is, my life and the progress of civilization have
something of the same shape. In this century progress has been swift and
severe, and my generation has seen the greater arc of its accelerating trajectory
toward a global transition. We may be the last to witness this
extraordinary human drama, as such acceleration clearly isn’t sustainable,
for a number of reasons, such as environmental tolerance.
When I take into consideration my austere origins on the plains of
West Texas in an agrarian family whose sustenance was largely derived
from manual labor aided by un-powered tools and domesticated animals, I
am overwhelmed. To have begun in such a simple place and time, and to
have seen so much, is at times incomprehensible to me. Likewise, when I
consider the earliest agrarian humans on the planet and where we have
come today as a civilization, I find the progress astounding. In 1930, space
travel wasn’t yet a significant part of the science fiction literary genre, but
40 years later I would travel in a spacecraft that would take two men to the
surface of the moon while its sister ship orbited overhead.
In the largest sense, the evolution of humankind has made similar
progress. We’ve evolved from a primitive species with limited knowledge
with which to fashion tools, to a civilization capable of building machines
that can split the atom or fill a magic box with image and sound. Yet our
civilization is still in its chronological infancy; in geological time, just a
few years out of the trees. As a species we seem yet juvenile, lacking in
vision, unprepared for our own evolution, even blind as to the direction we
are evolving. In this respect we lack any thoughtful, consensus judgment to
guide our conscious volition, because we are still uncertain as to whether
we actually possess volition at all, if one accepts the accounts of Western
philosophy, theology, and science.
101