Let the amazement begin! Gazing at the clear night sky from our Midwestern vantage point in the winter months means cold-weather wonderment takes hold and keeps us warm with delight. Or is it "de-Light?"
As a child, my imagination lit up the dark December nights as Earth's path around our star crept almost imperceptibly towards winter solstice.
I often wondered if anyone was out there looking toward Earth, as I was looking up and out into space. Any little points of light in the night sky were welcome invitations to dance with awe, and the nightly spectacle engaged my intellectual curiosity about constellations, the solar pathways of planets and moons, the formation of nebulae and galaxies, black holes and supernovae, the nature of light (is it particles or waves?), and how animal sensory perception like eyesight and echo-location, work at night. Among other questions. The night sky had me at hello! Natural Wonder. And I wasn't the only one.
Witness the experience of Apollo 8 astronauts Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders gazing at the spectacle known as "Earthrise" in December, 1968. Their sense of wonder at the gorgeous blue planet rising over the horizon of the moon captured their imagination and infused an indelible understanding about Earth as a whole. Here's the astounding recreation of the astroanuts' experience that led to the iconic photo known as "Earthrise" from NASA archives. You can hear the joy in their voices, and "see" what the astronauts captured from space. https://youtu.be/VDf0ONl-nDw?feature=shared
Once humanity saw Earth from this perspective, we could never not know our home planet as a whole, as an interconnected biospheric macrocosm. December 24,1968 forever marked our global perspective with this view of Earth from the moon, a moonshot memento. If you listen again to the astronauts as they see Earthrise for the first time, you will hear the childlike wonder in their voices.
Children often have a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for learning and wonder. "Why?" "How?" "Why?" They possess a sort of "intellectual humility" that allows questions to flow freely. Not knowing is their super-power for wonder, a sort of "innocent unknowing" that gives birth to not just knowledge accumulation, but integration, synthesis, and genuine awe and joy. Children who are enthralled with the natural world learn to love and respect Nature, and to protect Nature from harm.
The UN Global Climate Conference, COP 29, just concluded. I'm dismayed by our global antipathy about what is happening to affect our planetary well-being. Where is our moonshot momentum? What happens to us between palpable childhood curiosity about creation, the eco-virtue of wonder, and an ecology of ignorance - the notable stage of entrenched ignorance that is epidemic among human adults in this phase of Earth's development - the Sixth Great Extinction?
An ecology of ignorance celebrates a cultural antipathy toward learning, toward the search for valid knowledge, and the critical thinking and reflection essential to the cultivation of sound reasoning and ethical decision-making. An ecology of ignorance is a systemic, anti-intellectual toxin that limits or destroys human capacity for critical thinking and logical explication of complex global issues that affect the micro- and macrocosm. An ecology of ignorance obliterates nuanced critical reflection and ethical decision-making (read, 'voting') capabilities. In an ecology of ignorance, entrenched illogic spreads throughout socio-political and cultural matrices, perpetuating fallacious claims as reified truth. By infusing formal and informal fallacies into cultural and political rhetoric, an ecology of ignorance serves to confuse, terrify, and divide rather than delve deeply into meaning by examining arguments at the level of their premises. The ensuing rhetorical nonsense/illogic/invalid speech content reinforces fallacious memes through power dynamics intended to obfuscate truth by spreading intentional misinformation (read, 'deceit'). An ecology of ignorance, far from being a childlike knowledge gap, is a deliberate aversion to valid knowledge, i.e., deliberate ignorance, and it has far-reaching consequences for the biosphere.
Not only do we not know/digest/integrate what is happening to the biosphere, we do not want to know about the massive threats to our biosphere from human exploitation, waste and degradation. We want to believe only that which our compromised and faulty reasoning has led us to believe, even when presented with overwhelming rational arguments to the contrary.
It's called "brain-rot."
There's a good reason that the term, "brain-rot," coined by Henry David Thoreau in 1854, is the 2024 Oxford word of the year. Thoreau understood that the entropy of curiosity and wonder spelled disaster for the natural world. Those who use the term today are observing the effects of over-indulging in online consumption, excessive social media immersion, and the result - compromised cognition.
According to Thoreau scholar Cristin Ellis, "For Thoreau, 'brain-rot' describes what happens to our minds and spirits when we suppress our innate instincts for curiosity and wonder, and instead resign ourselves to the unreflective habits we observe all around us - habits of fitting in, getting by, chasing profits, chatting about the latest news." Thoreau advocated Nature immersion as an antidote. "He wants us to go outside to feel and think something for ourselves; he wants us to get to know the places where we actually live." (https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5213682/writer-thoreau-warned-of-brain-rot-in-1854-now-its-the-oxford-word-of-2024)
Why must we succumb to brain-rot? Why do we espouse an ecology of ignorance? It may be attractive to remain ignorant because it feeds our feelings of complacency and certitude. We think we know what we need to know already, so we don't need to learn or go deeper, and in fact we don't want to learn because it might challenge our own insular and faulty thinking.
Such a self-reinforcing system caters to our desire for defending our ignorance as a "right," because opinions - even those based on erroneous thinking - are an extension of ourselves. We prefer a dependence on faulty knowledge and thinking because it is ours, with no other reason needed, even though our dialogue partners may beg us to elucidate our premises. Our opinions - conclusions built on faulty premises - are sacrosanct, and we create a sort of barrier around our silo thinking, and the foundations of our own thought processes. We defend our ill-formed opinions with strident rhetoric like a moat surrounds a castle, to keep out any rational intellectual incursions that threaten our self-delusions of absolute certitude. Living in such massively defended perpetual delusion might be acceptable if we each lived in absolute isolation, but we live in constant, complex relationship with everyone else, and indeed every being in the biosphere. We've forgotten the lesson of Earthrise. And we are causing unprecedented harm because of our ecology of ignorance.
"Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn't it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs within us, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it." (Mark Lilla, "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," New York Times Opinion, December 2, 2024)
Natural wonder can be our North Star, an ethical compass for a posthuman context that moves around and within us at the speed of light. It can help us engage our world with a perceptual and spiritual acuity that served the astronauts looking at Earth from a distance. It can arouse the same intellectual curiosity - and accompanying humility - that allowed us to ask all our questions as children. We weren't ashamed that we didn't know. Our hunger to learn, to go deeper, to ask "Why?" was strong because we were so enthralled, so attracted to our beautiful planetary home. As adults, let's stoke our collective capacity for natural wonder. Let's look toward de-Light!
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