What's the Plan

Often in life, we are obsessed with planning everything in detail. We plan meals, vacations, sales quotas, home redecorating, retirement, budgets, parties, dates, what car we are going to buy, what we are going to say, and what we are going to wear. There's something uniquely human about our desire to plan everything.

It occurred to me that all this desire to think about the future course of things comes to a grinding halt in one conspicuous area. Thoughts of our impending doom. We don't want to think about our bodies failing or how we might die. We spend a considerable amount of time avoiding thinking about it. We spend a furious amount of time planning for everything else that comes between now and then.

It occurred to me that if we spent just a little bit of time thinking about our own mortality when making all our other plans, we might eat healthier, exercise more, and treat our friends and family with a little more love and respect. This doesn't always happen. Many of the people in the hospital or just in poor health today ate, drank, or smoked their way into that condition without much thought about where they were headed. People take the easy path of doing what pleases them, indulging in their vices and expend as little effort exerting themselves as possible. Not everyone, but most people. The planning is all about the things they love or want to do and not about how they are going to finish their life.

But we also plan for what happens after that. It's called religion. I think many people think about religion in a negligent manner. They look at it as a country club membership. They'll pay their dues by going to church when they can and contributing what they can. They'll say they believe and try to live a pious life, when it occurs to them. They may not have any real control over what happens after they die, but they will plan and act as if they do.

Sometimes, I wonder if people are really just fooling themselves. How do they know they're signed up for the right religion and doing the right things to get into heaven? What if they die and instead of the pearly gates, Zeus spends eternity berating them for not offering enough animal sacrifices? There was a South Park episode where a bunch of people died all at once and they were being sorted out in heaven, and someone in the crowd shouts out "Who was right? What is the one true religion?" and God or St. Peter says, "The correct answer is.... Mormons." You can hear people in the crowd going "What!? No way!"

I'm not an atheist. I'm of the belief that we don't know, can't know, and won't get to know what happens after we die until we die. Anything can happen. We could simply stop existing, nothing that was us may continue at all. It's hard to imagine, hard to believe, because it seems like such an insult, but it could happen. We could get recycled, reincarnated and reborn (what if it's no guarantee that you'll be human?). We could have something else entirely happen that we don't even have a frame of reference to understand. We could have any one of the religions in the world's story be the one and only thing that happens, or we could have each person's individual belief come to pass for that person. I kind of like the idea that your own personal force of will and belief will manifest itself - makes you feel powerful to imagine that's true.

To me, we don't get to know what's on the other side of life. It's a lot like a singularity, the universe, the big bang. They call it a singularity because there's no way of knowing what happens on the other side of that point in time. Some physicists believe that the universe may be like an enormous single stroke engine. It could be continuously expanding, collapsing, and being reborn in an endless cycle. To not know something isn't necessarily a bad thing. Often it's a good starting point for knowledge. I like to listen to everyone's idea of what they think the answer to this question is. I think often they just believe what they want to believe, what gives them comfort. What gives me comfort is to keep an open mind and wait and find out when it happens to me.

And to eat well and exercise enough. I would like to plan a little for the physical demise.

Temporal Binocular vision

My wife was telling me about something that she read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. The assertion was that Middle-easterners are focused on history and Americans are focused on the future. My wife believes \that history should play a part in the decisions we make, and that those decisions are for what will happen in the future.

I thought about what she said about history and future, east and west, Muslim and Christian. I believe that Science Fiction has always appealed to me because it is a way of hoping for a better future (and sometimes showing a worse future to avoid). I think in some ways, it is my theology.

The problem is that either option, a person that only looks to the past, or a person that only looks to the future is like someone with only one eye. Using both eyes, you have binocular vision and you can focus on something and take in it's depth (actually, you have depth perception with binocular vision, so the analogy comes close).

New technology is a double edged sword. If you charge toward the future with a new innovation you have to keep in mind the effects. If you do not have a good idea of what happened up to now, or what usually happens when someone makes a similar change, you can have unintended consequences. Ignoring the past can cause problems, either with the technology itself or with society's resistance to change.

Only through being grounded in the past can you learn from it and move confidently into the future. This isn't just introducing technology, but in politics and diplomacy, too. Look at Iraq for instance. If we paid the slightest attention to Viet Nam, we would have known that it was not going to be easy, but instead, we just looked at securing oil for now. Sometimes politics are short sighted.

The problem with many people that are focusing on the future is that they are focusing on the future of next month or next year, and not 5, 10, 50, or 100 years from now. In a way, it's not even fair to say that they are looking toward the future, they are looking toward their immediate short term needs. This country used to do things like buy the Louisiana purchase because they knew there would be a time when it would make sense to control all the land between the seas, this during a time when a trip of 100 miles could be a week long ordeal, and there wasn't even a way to get across the country yet. That's foresight and vision. What we do now that passes for thinking about the future is the equivalent of wondering what's for lunch.

We're getting a little better with science in analyzing long term impacts of current decisions. Climate change science is helping to focus scientific thinking in this respect. Evolution, Geology, and Astrophysics all teach us to think about things in the long term. In science, it's easier to predict things. Certain principles can be studied and replicated, most fields of study have similar patterns that can be expected.

This vein of thought when focused on politics is not very satisfying. Politicians are not rewarded for looking at the long view. The current news cycle is the predominant focus, and the 2 year election cycle prevents anyone from thinking beyond the immediate future. True leaders had a sense of the length of history and their place in it. Many people do not realize that Abraham Lincoln was horribly unpopular in his time, but his steadfast focus on mending the Union saw him through some terrible times and kept him working through all the setbacks until he succeeded. Now he is considered the best President we have ever had. John Kennedy put us on the moon, in a time scale that was beyond what he could have hoped to still be President, if he had lived and been re-elected. We need this kind of leadership today when we look at the way we will use energy and what we will do with our nation's debt in the future. Because one thing is for sure about the future, stick around long enough, and it will come to pass.