LeFevre: Where Did Man Go Wrong? Part One

The question of where man went wrong has vexed philosophers for millennia. It was my obsession for the first 15 years of my adult life. There are, needless to say, many theories.

I’ll give my insights in the next column, but first some background. I came of age during the NASA moon program. Indeed, my first non-family memories are of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Mercury Program.

America’s heroes now are soldiers who kill and are killed in undeclared, ‘asymmetrical’ wars, but back then, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and the early astronauts were real boyhood heroes. They risked their lives by being blasted into space atop unreliable rockets to catch up to the Russians, who had already orbited Yuri Gagarin.

My teenage friends and I developed a passion for science fiction, and as we followed the race to the moon, we began asking larger questions about man’s place in the universe. We went from the scintillating tales of Ray Bradbury’s Martians to the cerebral meditations of Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

When Kubrick’s film came out in 1968, my 16-year old friends and I spent weeks analyzing its meaning. With the aid of Clarke’s book, we came to understand that it was a theory about how humankind evolved and where we were going, based on the notion of an outside intelligence that manipulated human evolution at critical junctures.

In high school, I began to question and investigate the Catholicism with which I had been inculcated (Mass in Latin every day before school, plus Sundays, n of course!). Finding out what a corrupt crock the Church was, I came down one Sunday at 17, when it was still a mortal sin to miss Mass that day, and announced to my stunned parents that I wasn’t going to Mass that Sunday or ever again.

Some months after that, I had my first so-called mystical experience, which confirmed that spirituality had little or nothing to do with religion. I had been asking for weeks: What is this observer that always seems to be separate from what it observes within oneself? Watching a robin in the backyard one day, there was an explosion of insight, and I saw that thought is continually separating itself from itself, and that separation is the very essence of thought.

In that moment, all division dropped away, and the bird, in all its beauty and interconnectedness, was seen and felt. I realized I had never actually seen anything before, but that all one’s perceptions had been filtered through the distorting prism of conditioning.

After that I began to ask: Given that the universe, and all life, are part of a seamless whole and dynamic order, and that humans evolved along with all other life on this planet, how did humans become such a factor of destruction and disorder?

The environmental movement was just beginning, and concerns about pollution and the extinction of animals were starting to take political form. Global warming hadn’t yet even showed up on the radar. But one could see where things were headed, if you cared to look.

I read everything I could in Western and Eastern philosophy on what used to be called ‘the riddle of man,’ but nothing satisfied. My question became a quest.

Finally, after 15 years of persistent inquiry, there were a few new insights. Having worked at various jobs and finally accruing enough credits to get a college degree, I naively approached the deans of various philosophy departments on the West Coast, including Stanford, Berkeley, and Davis.

I had the now laughable idea that academia actually meant what it said about a doctorate being original work. Politely, one dean told me I’d have to “jump through the hoops,” while another said that “there is nowhere in the world” I could place my insights into an academic context.

So I wrote to David Bohm, the physicist blackballed during the Manhattan Project, whom Einstein had called his “intellectual son.” I then attended a weekend of intensive dialogues in a group with him in southern California, during which we inquired into many things concerning the human condition.

To my surprise he approached me after the dialogues were over and said he had received the letter laying out my new ‘theory of human nature.’ We talked about it a bit, and I bluntly asked him, “do you think I may have done it, finally resolved the riddle?”

“Yes, I think you may have,” he said. With the academic rejections still fresh in mind, I then asked, “What do I do with it?”

“Just don’t make another philosophical system out of it,” is all he said. I saw what he meant. That conversation ended my academic ambitions. But the insights stand.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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