Worse than The Bridge at San Luis Rey!

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 book The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a classic with a lesson for today that too many know but are in denial about.  Wilder’s book follows the lives of 5 different, generally unrelated people, who for a variety of reasons all end up at a rope bridge over a huge gully in the mountains of Peru.  Unbeknownst to them, they will be on the bridge when it fails, dropping them to their deaths.

Why were they there, a monk asks?  Was there some inevitability about their paths?  Were they connected by some unknown factors?  What, if anything, is the message of, or the lesson from their fates?  Even investigating the possibility of fateful forces cost the monk his life in the dour Church of his time.

But what about our time?  Are we, in a symbolic sense, headed for doom at a bridge that will fail, but to which we seem inevitably driven?  There are reasons to think this could be the case…..

Ecological self-made disaster
The world’s natural resources are fragile, destructible, and limited.  In particular, good arable land and other similar resources can be exhausted or destroyed by over-use and mistreatment.  And these factors can be brought on by the demands of an ever-growing population.  Furthermore, human short-term selfish thinking makes it difficult if not impossible for us to restrain ourselves.

In this case, the problem is global warming because of our relentless burning of fossil fuels.  This is made worse by our unconstrained destruction of the Amazon forest and so on, that are the ‘lungs’ of the earth in this regard.  We pollute the seas, over-fish, and have agricultural habits that destroy the long-term viability of the soils.

Glaciers melt, seas rise, and this inevitably will drive people away from major population centers that, historically, were located by transport media–seas, rivers, and lakes.  If these overflow their banks, massive numbers of people will head inland….but ‘inland’ is already densely occupied!  And these climate-related changes are well under way and, given the nature of things, their momentum is perhaps unstoppable.

Careless resource consumption and culpable over-population are responsible.  The warning signs have been around for decades (e.g., the widely read book The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968–now 51 years ago).  We have climate-change warners now commonly going around trying to tell people of the dangers (I’ll note that even these authors fly all over, contributing needlessly to the problem, to give talks at meetings, autograph their books at booksellers, and so on, though Greta Thunberg is a notable exception).  The hypocrisy, or lack of taking the problem seriously even by those who know better, is rather striking.  Or is it ‘frightening’ a better word: we simply can’t seem to restrain our individual greed and short-term pleasures, even when faced with an impending catastrophe.

To me, this is like passengers enjoying a leisurely, fancy meal, with fine wine, in the dining car of a train that is speeding towards a bridge that’s out–as in San Lus Rey.  But unlike the book’s characters, we know what the story is.  Yet, even so, we cannot seem to impose the obviously required consumption self-restraint on ourselves.  It’s due not only to relentlessly selfish insatiable commercialism or capitalism, but to our own individual, short-term selfishness as well, that we just seem unable to restrain.  Maybe our economic system makes that hard or impossible.  But it doesn’t make it not a problem!  We know the issues, but can’t seem to react properly.

Can we do anything about it–in time?  Will we?
Your guess is as good as mine…..and perhaps you’re more optimistic, less a student of history, and you’ll be right.  But based on human history, the odds are against that.  Disastrous societal strain seems inevitable.

Are we fated to meet at San Luis Rey, and plummet together into the rocky abyss?  Wilder’s book is worth reading…..and thinking about.  But in our case, the chasm we’re headed so rapidly to won’t just take out 5 unlucky travelers: it will destroy billions of lives!  And it will do that with slow trauma: famines, wars, displacement, and other disasters as an essential aspect of the process.

Of course, if it pares back the human population to some few million worldwide, the rest of Nature will rejoice, because it will, once again, have a chance to evolve in a more properly orderly way.