Seasons, Gas Prices, And Global Warming - The Lost Blog

Well, I'd written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I'm not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn't we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we're not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words "Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…"). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of 'the lost blog,' or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of 'no longer being' can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.