You can visualize every human who has ever existed as a node in space and time. We exist here and now, one in a vast array of faceted gems shining through space. We occupy orbital patterns, gravitate towards and away from one another, collide and careen. At each moment of interaction we are changed, new chemical processes catalyzing on our surfaces, new pulls applied to our orbits, shifting and forming who we are, bit by bit by bit. We make decisions which change trajectories. We captain ourselves through this space, as best as we can manage, toward unknown destinies.
You can, as well, visualize every human as a fiber in a thread in a long woven rope of humanity, each tangled with the next, spanning together over time. Our position is tightly constrained by the fibers and threads we are adjacent to, those we are tied to, immediately preceding us and proceeding from us. Every movement of every fiber seems infinitesimal looking at the rope, but is of paramount importance to those it jostles and intertwines with. Viewed from a distance it seems like the structure is constant and immobile, but when enough threads shift at once the entire trajectory changes, carries everything down the line somewhere new.
These are just metaphors. Neither one is inaccurate, neither one is complete – but one is, I suspect, a more comfortable and familiar conception to most of us. Most American media – most of the media I’ve encountered in my life here, and probably the most commonly imported sort in many other parts of the world – tends to view humanity largely in metaphors similar to the first. We are tiny isolated points in a vast space choosing our destinies, finding brief and fulfilling companionship with each other during our unpredictable journeys. It is beautiful and inspiring – and also quite alienating, a disconnected worldview which we are beginning to find completely inadequate to the challenges posed us. From a distance you can view the tides of humanity washing this way and that, building momentum towards historical changes, but from any closer you are helplessly caught in the waves, isolated and ineffective. A drop of water cannot control the wave, only hope that it is inevitably pulled where it needs to be. We are caught in an uncontrollable tsunami and, as long as we view ourselves as individual atoms, single drops, there is no hope for choosing what happens next. To cope with this, we’ve told a number of comforting lies. We pretend that humanity as a whole inevitably makes something called “progress”, that anything that happens later is by definition more advanced, more just and equitable, than whatever preceded it. We pretend that technological innovation is what liberated us from the crushing conditions of the past, rather than united worker action and exporting internal structures of exploitation – after all, the mere concepts of these vast intertwined systems are invisible from the point of view of the node floating in space and time.
We are still threads, though. We are connected to the past and the future, and we are woven together into a pattern that is impossibly daunting and tremendously important. The change in perspective necessitates a change in inquiry: From the isolated and atomic perspective, we are forced to ask “What can I do to make the world a better place?” This question is, past a few simple pat responses, effectively unanswerable. From the woven and intertwined perspective, we must ask: “What is my role in this? What can I be a part of to live in a world more like the one I want to live in? What patterns, if they emerge, will terminate this woven line, this thread, this rope? What will allow it to persist?”
We’re all part of something. It goes and it goes and we go with it, but how it goes still depends on the pattern and the pattern still depends on us. The drop in the sea is irrelevant, but the sea is everything and could not exist without the drop. I am in the sea and the sea is in me. We’re in it together.