You may think of what follows as the lead essay for Volume 11, Number 3 of my weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. Enjoy.
I actually had dinner across from Scott
Adams, in 1995.
Dilbert
was just getting hot, and Adams had recently quit his day job. He was
nervous about it. He’d taken the gig to address our corporate dinner
at CMP Media because he was nervous about making a living as a
cartoonist. I told him not to worry, that he was about to become
richer than his wildest schemes, and that his future problems would
lie in dealing with fame and fortune.
Scott and I are close to the same age,
and similar in temperament, except he has talent the market
recognizes while I remain (mostly) a legend in my own mind. No
matter. A few years ago he picked up the same vibes I was getting,
about Bush and war. Around the same time he lost the power of speech,
something he is only now starting to regain.
But he also began thinking about the
big questions, turning them into a “thought experiment” called
God’s Debris.
He then placed the character created for that book into a short
novella, The Religion War.
My 15 year old son, being an enormous Dilbert fan (the boy has good
taste) brought them both to me, demanded I read them, and promised to
discuss them with me later.
You might call this Clue a letter to my
son.
Adams’ conclusions on faith and the
nature of reality are not far removed from those of the movie What
the Bleep,
except he gives the person who can figure all this out special powers
to control mens’ minds and (his character thinks) to stop the Total
War between Islam and Christianity gathering over mankind.
Adams’ resolution of his novella is
elegant, and his writing style remains straight-ahead, even when
there’s nothing to be funny about. I’m sure that writing this was a
catharsis for him. It may be one for you on reading it, and if it is
then he has done his job.
Because we all face a catharsis, right
now, in our time, and these books get to the heart of much of it. We
face a growing war that is irrelevant to our real problems, and our
pig-in-the-python generation faces the ultimate questions. The
novella offers us two sides certain of their answers to these
questions, and it is our growing disillusion with this certainty that
is driving the present crisis.
What we lack is a real Avatar, someone
who will say publicly what so many of us (even Adams) are thinking
privately, offering a way past this Crisis that will realign the
global cosmos. This is the kind of work I have been, most humbly,
engaged in on this blog.
I have mainly engaged the problem from
the point of view of my own education, in political science, history
and journalism. I have talked about the real problems we face, about
the natural eras of our politics, which are based on our life cycle,
and proposed a general Thesis to carry us through.
To summarize:
- The real challenge is
environmental, replacing hydrocarbons with hydrogen, saving the
planet from its greatest enemy, us. - Each generation has its own
Political Thesis, born in a crisis that is now upon us. - The values that will get us past
all this lie in the medium you’re now using, the Internet. - Our new myth will grow out of the
last AntiThesis, just as Nixonism came from the shards of Joe
McCarthy, and as FDR picked up the banner of Woodrow Wilson. - The solutions will not be simple.
Complexity is at the heart of the new Thesis, as simplicity is at
the heart of the old. - It’s going to be a close-run
thing. It always is.Look at the great events that
occasioned the previous crises. A Civil War. National Bankruptcy. A
Great Depression. Vietnam.
Does what we see now stack up to this?
Yes, it does. There is an important lesson that must be learned, one
which is the opposite of the lesson we learned in the Vietnam crisis.
It’s a lesson about the limits of military power, the necessity to
engage our economic, cultural, technological, and diplomatic assets.
It’s about the real nature of the problems we face, not a rising tide
of Muslim anger, but a rising tide of hot water and filthy air
threatening to kill us all. And the answers don’t exist just in our
politics, but in what we contribute to this medium, and can get out
of it in the next few decades.
That’s what my Avatar sees anyway.
