Spirit in Action

Trees on Mars

Words like innovate, change, and adapt can be inspirational or the agent of doom for our well-being, depending on your perspective. In Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future, Hal Niedzviecki takes us on a ride through the technology & ideas which promise that we can "win the future", giving us a penetrating look at the consequences of our mad rush "forward".

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 15 Nov 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along We've got some awesome thought and perspective on tap today for Spirit in Action. We'll be talking with Hal Nidwetsky, author of a number of books, The most recent being Trees on Mars, our obsession with the future. Hal leads the reader to all the new gadgets, strategies, and plots to win the future. And he also profoundly questions just why we give up our societal imperative of certainty to know what's ahead in the frantic search for continuous innovation. In the questioning, Hal leads us down rabbit holes and through time and space to try and find humanly valuable explanations and directions. Hal Nidwetsky joins us by phone from Toronto, Ontario in Canada. Thank you so much, Hal, for joining me today for Spirit in Action. It is my pleasure, Mark. How long have you been in Toronto? I have been in Toronto sort of on and off for about, I don't know, 15 years or so. And can I ask your age? Sure, I'm 44. Okay, and I'm 61, so you're 17 years, my junior. And I think one of the things I was kind of interested in looking over your past, your bibliography was you must have had some significant involvement with zines along the way, which I don't know if they really exist quite in the same way. It's all online blogs or whatever now, right? So tell me about your history of zines. That seems particularly interesting pathway. Well, I'll tell you this, zines are actually on a huge comeback. I got into zines as a writer of kind of weird short stories. That's how I got my start. And I was sort of publishing these very strange short stories in what were essentially zines and little chapels and stuff. And then I realized that nobody could find these things even though there is this just absolutely terrific, exciting world of underground press. So I started a kind of meta-zine called Broken Pencil, which still runs today. And anyone wants to check it out, brokenpencil.com. So it's a big magazine that reviews zines and excerpts. And to your point about everything moving online, it's actually quite interesting because there was a point around the turn of the millennium when everything was moving online. And I thought we would have to either change our focus or fold up the magazine. But in the last five or six years, there's been this tremendous resurgence of paper publishing in the underground partly because of insecurity around putting out a lot of really powerful material online, particularly political material. And the other part I think is that people are just feeling the need for this tangible paper product that can connect them directly to communities and really create a different relationship with the reader than an online blog or a YouTube channel does. Is this related to feelings? One of the things that you talk about in Trees on Mars, and I'm skipping way ahead to even mention this, preppers, survivalists, preppers. They're trying to not be caught by the system, I guess is part of my view of it. So is this just one of the other manifestations of trying not to be absorbed into the global mind? I would say so, definitely. I mean in a completely different way. But a lot of the filmmakers who are making handcrafted, in some cases, very beautiful artifacts now, they are making a statement about community and local production that in some ways does connect to the survivalist, prepper movement that also sort of says let's keep local and let's build local communities and not become part of this sort of global network of mass consumption. Well, I just finished reading the book last night. I sat with it for the past couple of weeks reading it and taking a bit. And really, my mind is teeming with so many ideas. You pack a lot in the 270 or so pages of the main part of Trees on Mars. But maybe we should start out the same way that you start out the book, which is talking about some of the technologies, the glimpses of the new, exciting, different ways that the world is being run. Can you give us a couple of examples just to give people a taste of part of this future obsession that you deal with in the book? When I talk about future obsession, it is very much a technologically driven obsession. So I don't really get heavily into, you know, I'm not a tech guy in the sense that I don't think that technology is kind of, you know, this is an amazing thing. Well, given that you're not a tech guy, and I remember you commenting, you're sitting in one of the conferences at South by Southwest, you were saying he got, you know, a minute or two in, and I really couldn't follow the rest of it. But people are talking about all these apps or the big data or all of these different things that are innovating into our system. And partly, I have the feeling that you're really drawn by some of this. It's really interesting to you, but it's almost like being drawn to a snake that's going to bite you. I have some sense of you being drawn, repelled at the same time. So could you give a couple of examples of the kind of technologies that you interviewed people about? Sure, yeah. I mean, the book starts off at a giant tech conference, South by Southwest, interactive in Austin, Texas, and I'm there to just sort of take the pulse of the excitement around the technologies that will quote, unquote, create the future or get us to the future first, because people really believe this idea that we have to sort of innovate to the future. So I meet people who are creating things like, say, Tapper, which is an app that is going to solve the problem of having to wait for your drink when you get to the bar. You know, this isn't even a joke. These are very serious people who have spent a lot of time and money developing these things, and there's this energy at these events that completely is the opposite of the product they're developing. So there's this kind of intensity and urgency, and then you find out, oh, okay, you are making an app for drink orders, or you're making a new way to search the internet that is going to allow you to better share your searches and discoveries with your friends. And yet the people doing these things just feel so urgent, and they sort of would look at me and say, you know, I'm all in on this. There's no plan B here. This is my way to change the world. This has the potential to change the world. But what's really technologically what's fascinating about this, and as I got deeper into the book, this is sort of one of the big revelations, is that almost everything that we call an innovation right now in our society is rooted in the massive collection of data and the massive ability to search that data. So the vast majority of the innovations in the sort of consumer electronics sphere, so this would be sort of apps and tools for business and all these things that allow us to connect to things we want to buy faster. It all has to do with data collection, and then processing that data at unbelievable speed, speeds that were really just science fiction 20 years ago. So there isn't sort of one technology that is all pervasive that is changing our lives. There is just computer processing power, and that's the main factor in a bunch of overlapping so-called innovations that I say so-called, because when you really look at them you see that they aren't really all that innovative. And I asked you earlier, I mean, how do you react to this? Are you entranced by it in a positive and/or negative way? Me personally, I am definitely entranced by it and mesmerized by it. Mainly because you meet people, for instance, I went to the company called SRE, which is one of the most profitable tech companies in the world, but it only sort of works with governments and business. So you don't hear about it the way you hear about Microsoft or Apple or Facebook. And this company is sort of charting the movements of people on a mass scale, and they're able to sort of say, okay, in a suburb of a certain city, at a certain time, on a certain weather pattern, people will be in a certain place in certain amounts of numbers, and this would be a good time to send all the people of this particular area code, a coupon for Starbucks. So this is sort of mesmerizingly fascinating. And yet at the same time, for me personally, I feel a tremendous despair that as we kind of teeter on the edge of collapse in so many different directions, there is this massive, incredible energy being applied to taking our consumer lifestyle to that next level where we live in almost a bubble of constant, virtualized anticipation of our needs. To me, this is tremendously sad, and it starts to, as the book goes on, and I get deeper and deeper into this, and what people really believe about where we'll be when we own the future, I sort of get more and more despondent and kind of angry about it. Yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, actually the point of ultimate, I think, despair happens, and maybe excitement for some people. You talk about a certain religion, Tarism, that actually is kind of looking forward to this, but in the book you mentioned four major precepts, core tenets of Tarism. Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, and love is essential. Some of those, like love is essential, a lot of people say, "Well, of course, good, good, good." Life is purposeful, okay, that's great, great. Death is optional, people go, "Whoa, death is optional, I don't know about that." But God is technological. Back in 1984, I was at a national clicker gathering, and the main keynote speaker, plenary session, the guy who was giving that presentation said that in the United States, the question is often phrased, are we Christian or non-Christian, or it's a debate between which sect of religion you're part of. But his point back in 1984, this was, he said, "Our true God in the United States is technology." So what Tarism is saying, I heard back in 1984, I see exactly the point. Some people might say, we're a materialist, that that's where we see our divinity. But technology will save us, is a really common thought, as opposed to being saved by Jesus or whatever. So even though we don't think of technology as a religion, it is a theology, it is where does our Savior, where does our help, what is our solution, you know, thank technology. Absolutely, and you know, Tarism is so fascinating because it reveals that. It strips there the pretensions of technologists and shows it to be really a spiritual and philosophical movement, which is not what they want at all. You know, you want to be seen as scientists, as kind of cold-blooded logicians who are pushing us toward a natural evolution, and that anyone who questions this or opposes this is in some way acting unnaturally, you know, because you're questioning progress, so called. Speaking of progress, in addition to Tarism as a potential future outcome, you talk about Ray Kurzweil and the idea of the singularity. Why don't you outline just what that is, because for some of us, that makes us cringe, and while for others, they're all like, hooray, hooray, on to the singularity. Sure, to outline what it is, I think I need to sort of start at maybe the beginning of the book a bit more, so the central argument of the book is that we're moving into the time where we are really obsessed with the future, and this manifests itself in organizing our society more and more into components that will supposedly help us to get to the future first, our own the future. So, you know, you always hear politicians will say, we have to own the future, and people believe this, and this rhetoric has seeped into society, so we're changing everything from the way we educate our young people to the way we do business to the way we provide social security and services for people around this idea that we need to remove impediments that slow down our arrival at the future. And this is a very, this isn't kind of a metaphorical idea, this is a very practical, ongoing thing that's happening in our society, and the book repeatedly points to all kinds of examples of that. One example of that is the desire to reach the end point of future, which in my mind is the point at which human beings no longer have a future because the future is over, because we've become immortal. There are people, and this is a growing mainstream idea, who believe that we can achieve immortality through technology. How are we going to do this? Well, one of the most popular ideas and methods of getting to the end of future, at which point we have completely owned the future, one of the most popular methods of this is the singularity. And this is my idea put forth by Ray Kurzweil and many other people. Ray Kurzweil is a kind of inventor, scientist, engineer who works at Google, and he basically says, we're going to achieve a singularity. We are going to merge with our computers and become immortal, so we will have some sort of consciousness that will be implanted with our technology, and we will no longer have a corporeal body that we have to worry about. And in this way, we achieve immortality. We live forever at the end of future. And this is something very concrete that they believe will happen. Perhaps they believe they'll attain this around the year 2045, which is 30 years from now. And there you go. So it's a very fascinating thing, because when you look at a lot of what people are doing around the future, it's considered very mainstream, very normal to say, we have to own the future. We have to get to the future first. But once you start getting into the natural conclusion of this, which is getting to this endpoint where there is no future, because we live forever in probably some sort of techno-virtualized bodyless existence, then you reach the point where you start to wonder, what is this exactly? Is this a technological solution? Is this, you know, a yearning? Is this a religion? Is this something that is philosophical who really has thought through what this actually means even as they attempt to do this in real life? You know, you use the phrase, and I think they use the phrase, particularly to merge with our computer. And the same way that TerraSim talks about having mind files and all that kind of thing. But the thing that I'm sitting there watching is saying, "Who says we need to merge? Aren't they maybe the next step in evolution?" And we're going to go the way of the Neanderthal. Why do we need to be in the computers? There's a pretty good with how a human mind slowing them down perhaps. Well, sure. I mean, that's another possibility that we will simply be overcome by our computers. We will be rendered obsolete by their more powerful thinking power, their lack of need for clean air and clean water and clean food. And so the computer will overcome us. Now, this is not as popular an idea for the obvious reason that the idea of artificial intelligence, bringing the conclusion of humanity to an end just does not seem as fulfilling as. We will merge with our artificial intelligence and have sort of the best of both worlds. You know, quite frankly, both of these ideas are idiotic in my mind. They are not useful to thinking about the present or the future. They are kind of red herrings that people obsess about and use as excuses not to have to do the hard things that we really need to do as a human race. But you have to admit how you've already said you're not a tech guy. I'm a computer programmer consultant. I've been doing that for 35 years or so and I studied in college five, six, seven, eight years before that. So I've got a long history with that. So when you say they're idiotic, do you mean that they're not technologically likely possible or do you mean that that's a really dumb way to go? I would say both in some ways in the sense that merging humanity with computers and achieving some sort of singularity is technologically very unfeasible from everything that I have read. And it is more popular as a kind of ideology than as an actual scientific thing that we could achieve. The idea of sort of artificial intelligence taking on its own consciousness and overcoming humanity is again, I think, an extremely unlikely, you know, sci-fi type scenario. But both are such tiny worries when we look at the much bigger picture of the many ways in which humanity can come to a conclusion, you know, if humanity was overcome by a technology and eradicated by a super race of AI mobile phones, you know, I don't think that I would be all that worried about it. In a way, you know, it would be some sort of evolutionary kind of thing. What we're talking about here are really kind of dumb ideas that people use as an excuse to not look at where we're really going with all this. Which, I guess, has something to do with the name of the book. Also, Trees on Mars are obsession with the future. And it's by Hal Nidvietsky. And it talks about so many ideas. And I'm really struggling here, Hal, to fairly represent the book. I mean, it's kind of like we really need to talk about it for a good ten hours. I know. That's a lot of radio. Well, one of my ideas and one of the reasons I do spirit and action in the way I do it, I'm an advocate of slow radio. That soundbite type journalism gives you the kind of idiotic ideas you're just referring to, the idea that we can just do it very quickly and that it'll have the same value or content or depth of perception. I don't think we can do that even though we're thinking very fast. And I think that by going fast, we don't see. It's like if you drive past a landscape versus if you walk along it, there's a whole different level of perception and understanding and presence that you get. So, where do you come down, you know, fast food versus slow food? Or, you know, short stories versus Les Miserables, you know, 800, whatever pages that it is. Where do you come down in that? I mean, I think you're absolutely right that as a society, we have transformed everything into kind of the soundbite and the quick experience that triggers our pleasure sensations, but that leaves us kind of empty and, you know, we're still hungry for more. And I think in the context of trees on Mars, it's particularly interesting because we do have this just sort of constant barrage of quick hits about technology. You know, so you'll see a headline, a 22-year-old shelf company to Google for $17 million. And a lot of people will say, "Oh, well, that sounds good. I should get into that business." You know, I'd like to be a 22-year-old multimillionaire. And, you know, we see the kind of, just kind of this amazing thing on the news, you know, be like so-and-so has figured out how to take your brain out of the skull and put it into someone else's skull. And we kind of like, "Oh, yeah, that's the future." In fact, there was a 2014 poll done by the Pew Research Center that found that three out of five Americans, if you're looking at about 60%, feel, here's the quote, "The technological advancements will lead to a future in which people's lives are mostly better." We have, in the same poll, four out of five people, 80% of Americans think that in the next 50 years, we'll be able to grow new organs in a lab. And it goes on like this, you know, one in three expect that humans will have colonized planets other than Earth in the next 50 years. So these quick soundbites create the perception that we are moving toward a sort of technological nirvana in which all of our problems are solved through technology and that we don't actually have to worry about or deal with anything other than encouraging and creating new ways for us to get to this future via technology. So it's actually a very damaging situation when we look at sort of how technology is talked about and reported in the mainstream media. You know, I want to go back to that phrase. Here's how we get to the futures, here's how we own the future, those kind of phrases. I suspect that there's some ulterior motives behind those phrases because I'm never quite sure who the "we" is. I mean, is it the handful of technological people who have the successful apps or the successful invention or weapon on Google or whatever? Are they the "we" or who's the "we" at? Do you see that same level of manipulation going on there? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you sort of, there's this sense that we, the royal "we", all of humanity, or at least all of America is getting to the future. But when you get deeper into this, you see that in fact the "we" is a handful of technological billionaires and the rest of us are, to some degree, to some greater or lesser degree, shut out of this supposed future. So again, it's a very, very powerful psychological idea that we will get to the future and people who aren't on board with this by implication be left behind. But most of us are on board. We embrace the future and this idea that we have to own the future and get to the future first. We embrace it often to our own detriment, but we don't seem to garner the rewards for this the way a very small number of people are getting rewarded for this kind of myopic view of what human life should be about. And when we talk about sort of income inequality and the huge problems that are being raised by this, I would argue that technology underscored by this ideology of owning the future is one of the most powerful tools of creating income inequality and we're seeing that now as we're sort of funneled through a handful of corporations that control all of our portals to the future. You know, I want to get into that in some depth, but first I want to remind our listeners that they're tuned in to the program called Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org on that site. You'll find more than 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find a place to leave comments and you'll find connections to our guests. When you do visit, please post a comment because we love two-way communication. There's also a place to donate because that's how this is funded. It's full-time work for a couple of us and so please do support us when you come. Even more important though is to support your local community radio station. Providing alternate voices of media is so very crucial. And a lot of them appear on the internet as does this program. You can access all the programs via northernspiritradio.org. But having something that goes over the radio waves and community radio stations do that for our nations, provide a glimpse of both news and of music that you get nowhere else. So please start by supporting your local community radio station. Our guest today is Hal Nidvietski and he is a thinker. I would emphasize the thinking part. There's so much that you do now that's deep that way. An author, cultural investigator, he's writer of fiction and nonfiction. He's up in Toronto, Canada, although he originates from near Washington, D.C. His most recent book is Trees on Mars, Our Obsession with the Future. And you were just talking about income inequality. And I've had this thought and I've touched it to several people and economists and such that I've talked to who are on alternate ways of thinking in the same way perhaps that I am. And I've said it appears to me that if we continue on this trek towards the future with all this innovation and automation and artificial intelligence and so on, we'll get to the point where there's fewer and fewer people needed to do the actual work of keeping society going. And that at a certain point then the only people getting paid will be this handful of people who pull the levers or say go to whatever the intelligences are that are running us. And that therefore all of the income goes to them and it's clear to me that we have to find some way to share the productivity that comes out of it. Because we won't need to do labor although we may always choose to do something. So when I read what you wrote in the book, you talked about how the demands for labor did not go down until starting I think you said in the late 1990s maybe that's when it was. Because there was some level of innovation that changed things at that point. Could you talk about that trek of what labor is needed? You know the argument has always been that technology does not create a decline in labor that in fact it creates new markets and new possibilities for the workforce. And this has always been true up until the rise of what you might call the digital revolution. So when they invented the automobile it was true that the horse and carriage operator was out of a job. But on the other hand you had so much work to create this infrastructure for the automobile. Road crews and oil and gas industry and mechanics and car assembly line workers. So there's this incredible amount of work that had to be done to enable us to drive wherever we wanted to go. By contrast around the late 90s we had the introduction of big data and giant data processing power which allowed for maximal optimization. What this means in real life is that on the one hand we have more and more automated technologies that can process huge amounts of data and do things that human beings used to be able to do. On the other hand where human beings are still needed we can optimize and I use this word kind of ironically we can optimize for maximum profit how and when they are going to work. So as an example let's say you ran a store and you needed a certain amount of employees and they are all coming in and out and you use a system that will tell you, "Okay it's raining today, it's a Wednesday in October based on our data points. This is going to be a slow day." So someone comes into work and two hours later they get sent home and that person of course is a part-time worker and doesn't receive any compensation for the hours they were supposed to get paid. And so this kind of optimization is happening everywhere, blue collar, white collar. And you know there is a group of economists that did a fascinating study and they showed that the cognitive skills that you needed to have a successful career were continuing to grow. So people needed more education, more ability to think and be creative. And this was right up until around the year 2000 when they started to shrink. And it started to be the fact that people needed less education and less thinking power because these systems had all been put in place. Now we were just sort of cycling through and operating these systems as opposed to really having to think about things. So we not only have fewer jobs, more part-time jobs, more precarious labor and of course this leads to lower wages but even on the higher echelons of what we might call sort of the highly educated white collar workforce we require less educated people. And the jobs that they have involve less cognitive skill. So when you say we're reaching, you know, we will one day get to this point where people will just simply not be needed in the workforce. I would argue that we're already at this point. We have already arrived at this point. And whenever you hear that the jobless rate has gone down you really have to look at the fine print and you'll see that almost all the jobs being created are part-time jobs, precarious labor, offering low wages and little or no benefits. And pretty soon those jobs are going to be gone because just as you need workers now at Burger King or McDonald's or whatever, that's going to be automated in the future too. People come in and they just say what they want and there's an artificial intelligence that will deliver it to them. Why do you need people for that? It seems clear to me that we're moving toward that future and that demands a whole new way of thinking which I think you're trying to help us get toward by writing Trees on Mars. Yeah, absolutely. I mean what's fascinating about this is that all of this is happening under the rubric of getting to the future first. So there's very little resistance to this. In other times, in other periods of human history, you might have a giant kind of uproar against some of the things that are happening, including this massive overturning of our ability to make a living in our society, the data monitoring that is happening in the workplace. There are companies now that are monitoring every keystroke that employee makes. Every move they make, every conversation they have, even there are some companies that are analyzing these and determining who are the most productive employees that they can promote and who are the least productive that they can demote based on data collection. So once upon a time some of this stuff would have really gotten people to the point of, I'm not going to say necessarily revolution, but certainly wide-scale protest. But because we have this rhetoric around technology, a lot of it somehow manages to go through unquestioned. If somebody was sort of standing in your office writing down every key that you touched on your computer keyboard or writing along with you in your delivery van and noting whether or not you put your seatbelt on before or after you started the vehicle, since you're supposed to put it on before for maximum energy efficiency, and this is actually tracked by some of the carrier and delivery companies. If someone was actually physically there, there would be protests and rage, but because it's all automated, it is seen as progress and it is seen as the future. So this rhetoric around, well, this is what we have to do if we're going to be the best we can be in our society. This rhetoric is so powerful that it almost sweeps away objection and it kind of hypnotizes people. Well, I have to go and check my Facebook page now. I don't know why. I don't know what I do there, but I have to go to it. And do you get accused of being anti-efficiency, anti-adaptation? Like, are you opposed to evolution? Is that what you're saying? People attack you with that kind of fun? Well, I mean, you know, evolution is a natural protest that happens over billions of years, which people deny based on ignorance and religion mainly because it's imperceptible. This is not evolution. This is human creations. We make these things. Often they're developed at universities or by the government, supposedly for the good of all people, or at least of people living in the United States. And then they are applied in ways that no one could have anticipated. And so it's not a question of technology or evolution. I am pro-human. And I want to not maximize efficiency, but maximize the things that make life worth living, which are community and storytelling and the ability to look at one's life and see worth. And most of the so-called technological innovations that we're putting out into the world achieve the opposite effect. They minimize human contact. They minimize what makes life worth living. So, you know, I think that that is one of the biggest problems in having conversations now about technology is people will say, "Well, are you -- so you're against technology." And that's such a binary diminishment of a very complicated conversation. So there are some technologies that are doing credible things and allow people to maximize their humanity. But most of the technologies that we have come up with since the late '90s, amidst the data revolution, do not fit into that category of life-changing, innovative ideas that maximize humanity. You know, when we talk about innovation, we say, "Okay, you know, the iPhone. That's an innovation." But when we really look at it, innovation, which is dictionary defined as the introduction of something new, innovation is actually quite rare, and it usually comes out of the philosophical idea, such as the idea that all people are created equal, or that women and men should have the same rights. You know, these are profound innovations, and in so much as they are kind of put into society and change the way people live and introduce something new into their lives that maximizes their humanity. You know, that is true innovation. Now, the iPhone, which takes television and puts it on a phone, takes the corded phone and puts it on a wireless device and takes, you know, what you might call basically just advanced telegraph and puts it on a device. You know, that to me is not an innovation. It is a neat bit of technology, but it is not truly the introduction of something new into our society, and it is certainly not that which we should look to for the future of humanity. I do try and study history as well as physics as well as all these other fields. So I do have a perspective that perhaps is more than, you know, just this decade or this half-century we're in. I imagine that people thought the world was going to hell in a hand basket during World War II or during the Black Death or any number of times during the past. And I've heard people, my wife's father, who had worked at a man of refrigeration. You know, he worked, and he was a woodworker as well as working with the mechanical stuff at the factory, and yet he could not learn to use a CD player. It just wasn't right for him. And of course he was up in his 80s by the time he was trying to do that. So I understand that there's part of us that resists things being different on the individual level, but you've certainly heard the jokes about the six-year-old kids who are teaching their 34-year-old parents how to use something on the computer. So there is something very malleable about the human way of interacting with technology that I think we can't underestimate how malleable we are that way. But still, I come back to the same question. I think you address it, values. Why would we do something? Why would we not do something? I don't think those questions occur to a lot of people. They just say, "Well, it's there, so I'll use it." And I have problems with that, but for me, and again, I'm a Quaker. I mean, there was a teen retreat here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I'm at this past weekend. This includes teens from around Wisconsin and Minnesota. They picked for their topic. And I hope this blows your mind appropriately. The teens picked for their topic for this retreat. Humility in the age of social media. Nice. It sounds like something you'd write a book about. Yeah, it's not. But just to think about these things, why would we do this? And what would it lead us to be like? Questions like that, a good portion of the population isn't interested in looking at such questions for too long. So I see it as essentially a spiritual question, though I don't know if that's a perspective that's particularly comfortable for you. So could you give us some idea of where you've been spiritually and religiously and where you are now? I am Jewish, so I was raised in a conservative Jewish family that was sent to Jewish day school, where we learned Bible and what we called a Torah. And then we learned a commentary on the Torah. I learned Hebrew, and we prayed twice a day. And eventually I got, let's put it politely, I was asked to leave that school in ninth grade. That was the end of my formal Jewish education. And I would say that a lot of people probably like the predominant number of people in North America. I'm not religious, I'm not affiliated with an official religion. However, I love the community and social and traditions of Judaism, and I try to bring those things into my life and into my family. Because ultimately I feel like that's where, for me, that's where the spirituality and where the meaning comes from, not in keeping kosher or following a giant book of rote laws, many of which do not seem to make a lot of sense to me. So that's where I am spiritually, if you could say that. I'm not a terrifically spiritual person, I would say. I'm a skeptic first. I don't know how I became that way, but I think that is also part of the Jewish religion, which is filled with constant commentary on the commentary on the commentary. Everybody has an opinion, and so in some ways I am following in that great tradition of Jewish thought. And I think of Spinoza, the great humanist who was literally excommunicated from the Jewish religion for daring to come up with ideas that were way ahead of his time. I'm not saying that my grandfather used to call me Spinoza. Spinoza! In terms of my overall feeling about the spiritual and the technological, I think that we've talked about this already a bit, that it really is a fascinating thing to watch people replace a religion and other kinds of spirituality with this kind of unwarranted belief in the power of technology to change the path of humanity, even though what they really want is they want the kind of social certainty that they used to get from closer knit, generally religious communities. So this is a pretty complicated idea that I explore at Oink in the book, but it basically means that we want, as the Spanish philosopher Daniel Inorarity puts it, we want social certainty. We want to know that when we wake up the next day, everything is going to be the same, and the day after that, and the day after that. And when we look at how people lived in the pre-modern era, people lived primarily to foster social certainty. The idea that everything that happened today will happen again tomorrow and on and on for all time. And in fact, people didn't think about the past and the present and the future as three segmented, differentiated time periods. They only lived in this kind of eternal moment, the ongoing now. And they were taught, they believed that their death was not really the end, it was just sort of the continuity. They had to die in order to make room for the next generations who would pretty much be exactly like them. So this needs to be contrasted with the ideas that we have now about technology in which we want to own the future and get to the point where we can actually end the future and live forever. On the one hand, this seems like it is radical and new, and it is disruptive and innovative. But in truth, the idea of getting to the end of the future and living forever represents a real yearning to return to those times of social certainty when you weren't terrified by death when death was all around you and was part of the continuity of the eternal moment. You know, you would die, but your death was, in many ways, the signification of your culture living on. Wow, so many deep questions to deal with. I think you don't actually list yourselves this way on your website. The one for your current book, trees on mars.net or on your personal website, which is alongcametomorrow.com. You are a philosopher, in case you didn't know it. I don't know if you had an agree in that direction, but you are a philosopher clearly. It's so well reflected in the book, Trees on Mars, our obsession with the future. Hal Nidvietsky is our guest today for spirit and action. He's got previous books too, and you might want to start with them, work up the trees on Mars, I'm not sure. The Peep Diaries is one of them, how we are learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors. We want some too is another one, hello, I'm special, and there's also his fiction writing that you can look up. You know, it's interesting because I think the difference for me between, and this is probably unfair to philosophers, but when I write, my writing style is very much to go out into the world and to spend time with people and go to places of business and go to conferences and track people down who are doing the kinds of things that I'm curious about. And I think that sort of is what separates me as the philosopher from the kind of, not quite a journalist, but someone who's just curious about things is I don't go out to try to prove an idea. What I see in the world leads me to an idea, and that maybe is a difference, I'm not sure. Well, I think philosophers come in many different stripes and some of the best philosophers. I mean, I think some of the best philosophy I've read has come from the survivors of the Holocaust. Yeah, yeah. Some of the best philosophy I've read is actually in the writings of Einstein. He wrote one about the economic system, something he put in actually a time capsule in the 1930s, and he talks about having faith in future generations that will evolve enough so that we won't have this stupid economic system, which has its bursts and busts in the way that people get thrown around by our economic system. He has confidence in future generations that will figure those things out. We haven't, obviously, and so maybe his confidence was overly generous for us. Well, maybe we still will. It hasn't been that long since Einstein. But anyway, my point being simply that philosophy I do not see is just the naval gazers, although I think naval gazers can do a lot because, and I think you would even advocate for this because one of the things I do as a Quaker, and most Quakers do, we have this period at least each week where we sit for an hour of silence. You might think of it as naval gazing, silence where there's no leader to this. It's not like someone is telling us what to do. But we sit in a circle and we cumulatively try and grab light by stopping the constant bombardment. So slow food and slow radio make good sense to me. And that's really a meditative type approach, which is, again, interesting from the trees on Mars perspective, which is the consequences of trying to own the future and reshape our society to encourage people to be change agents. The consequences of this are tremendous anxiety and depression. So we have, in any given moment, three out of every five Americans is having a depressive or serious anxiety problem. That's 60% of the population of the U.S. And there's been this explosion of kind of meditation treatments for this, among other kinds of treatments pharmaceutical mostly, because, again, I get back to the social and cultural issue of what humanity really is. And humanity's core is social certainty and reassurance. That's why we have community and culture. But it's being undermined by almost an economic system of disruption in the purported attainment of future. And so people are tremendously beleaguered by this, even though they are desperately trying to embrace it. But it is such a jarring idea that we shouldn't live for now. We should live for some sort of future period that we may or may not see. But it doesn't really matter because we're sort of contributing to the ascendancy of the humans to, you know, ultimate supremacy. This is a very ultimately anti-human idea that the grades community and anyone who kind of says, well, this is, you know, the natural evolution of humanity, only has to really look at the explosion of mental health problems in our society to say, well, if this is the natural path of humanity, then I'd like to get off that path. I'd like to take the unnatural path toward sustainable community and the ability of people to have meaningful lives right now. And I know the ways that I do that. For instance, I'm part of a transition town group here in Eau Claire. And I think that's a healthy way of anticipating the future while being wonderfully rooted right here in the present. If you don't know about transition towns, you'd be rewarded by listening to my interview about them with Steve Chase and Ruis Wonderfault on Nordenspiritradio.org. The point is we can each choose bits of sanity to live out instead of being dragged along by the societal future obsessed craziness. But in terms of solutions, you don't end trees on Mars with a hopeful note and a pep speech prescription. Yeah, call your Congress person because everything's going to be just fine if we all get together and put the right pressure on the political system to change. And I end the book saying, I'm not giving you the 10-point prescription for solving our obsession with the future because that would be a lie that I believe that this is something that we can all get together and cure. Our obsession with the future is our last gas attempt to maintain an absolutely unsustainable lifestyle. And I don't think that we're going to come to our senses anytime soon and abandon technological solutions for social and cultural problems, which is what we need to do. So the end of the book was really the most painful chapter, perhaps I've ever written in my entire career of writing 10 or so books. It was really hard to write that chapter because it is so dark and I was trying to be as honest as I could be. And that included a kind of rejection of hope. Well, dark nights of the soul often lead to dawn and light and we, as a species, may have to go painfully through a dark night so that we learn to swallow the bitter pill and find a future which is not simply winning the future, but living into the future with integrity and wholeness. Folks, I want to remind you, we've been talking with Al Nidwiecki and his recent book is Trees on Mars. You can find that on TreesOnMars.net or his other website alongcametomorrow.com. Those links are on NorthernSpiritRadio.org and so we'll get you to him. He's got a lot of books out there. He is an author, a thinker, a cultural investigator. He's exploring the human condition in our rapidly morphing culture. There's so much in this book. We scratch the surface as part of this conversation with Hal and I really think you will be enriched by reading Trees on Mars. I want to thank you so much, Hal, for doing this honest, deep exploration of the human condition for trying to get us to look at reality and be part of shaping a future we can live through and accommodate. Thanks so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Oh, thank you for having me, Mark, and thanks to everyone for listening. Special thanks to Andrew Janssen for Production Assistance today, and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of NorthernSpiritRadio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)