Sometimes you lie in bed at night and you don’t have a single thing to worry about.  That always worries me. Charlie Brown (Charles Schultz)Every so often I get together with a few friends of mine and try to make some sense of the world over a couple of beers.  So far, unsuccessfully. I can’t honestly even say that we’re making any progress.  About the only thing I can conclude from this is that either the world doesn’t make any sense, or that we don’t. On the bright side, at least we’ve narrowed our focus.  On the not-so-bright side, maybe we’re just not drinking enough beer.Humans have been trying to make sense of the world ever since the world consisted of caves, clans, and creatures that were trying to eat them. Not everyone, of course. Some were incapable of making sense, and sitting around the cave calling attention to that fact did little to further our advancement.  As a survival strategy this wouldn’t seem to make much sense, but every election season we are reminded of how well it works.  In any case, most humans would have liked to have something to show for their efforts, like food, water, shelter, and mates, whether they made sense or not. Some things never change.Like all animals, humans evolved with only these four basic needs.  But their world was small then, and humans have never liked to be limited. If other animals could have four, there was no reason they couldn’t have five.  While it is debatable whether this need for more constituted a fifth basic need, this was only the beginning.Despite this inauspicious start, humans slowly began to grow their world by exploring, making discoveries, accumulating knowledge, and then trying to make sense of it.  Science, religion, philosophy, and even essay writing were some of the tools that were used to do this.  As was the reality hammer that sometimes hit them over the head, which is why I’m wearing a hard hat as I write this.  Don’t worry though.  As far as I know, no readers have been harmed by any of my essays. Some have said they don’t make enough sense to hurt a fly.
The thing is, while every species tries to make sense of the world in their own way, other species do so only in support of their basic needs, while we have now gone so far beyond them that we claim our basic needs include everything from desirable things like smartphones, tattoos, and melatonin gummies, to potentially world-ending things like fossil fuel burning, nuclear weapons proliferation, and artificial intelligence that is too smart for our own good.  To say nothing about new country music.  One way to look at this, I suppose, is that all our sense making has taken most of us from the Stone Age to the Space Age.  We all know who the stragglers are.Now, I’m not admitting to anything here, but I have a stone to throw.  Perhaps it’s those stragglers who really make the most sense.  Perhaps, with all that humans have accomplished, all we’ve really done is to make the world more complicated than it needs to be.  And that with each giant step for mankind, we’re only making it harder to make sense of the world.  Even Aristotle, one of the first scientists, came to realize this when he said, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”  And 2,000 years later, Einstein said the same thing, suggesting to me that maybe we should replace The Land of Opportunity as America’s slogan with What’s the point?NASA via Getty Images/Getty Images North America/TNSEarth, as seen from a distance of 1 million miles by a NASA scientific camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft on July 6, 2015.This Paradox of Knowledge suggests that we don’t know the half of it.  While the implication of this is plenty worrisome, it should be even more so knowing that between Aristotle, Einstein, and me, we’ve possibly influenced Western thought more than anyone. If Aristotle were here today, beyond looking silly in a toga, I believe he might say that what we don’t know about the world is now reaching a crisis.  Einstein might say that each giant step forward is really taking us a giant step closer to the Stone Age.  And as always, I will continue to say, Another beer, please, because that has become a basic need for me.  You can’t make sense of what you don’t know, and after Aristotle and Einstein, I feel like I know next to nothing.When I was a boy, the only thing that didn’t make sense was girls.  Thinking back on it, that might have been the first demonstration I had of Aristotle’s and Einstein’s paradox.  Also of just how wrong I can be in asking, What’s the point?  Nevertheless, I suggest that we all stop trying so hard to make any more sense of the world.  I think we’ve made enough sense for one species.  Perhaps now is the time for a new basic need – a need to rest on our laurels instead of always needing more.  Personally, I wouldn’t know a laurel if I sat on one, but since I’ve come this far with Aristotle and Einstein, I’ll rest on theirs.Bob Lorentson is a writer and retired environmental scientist. His latest book is You Only Go Extinct Once (Stuck in the Anthropocene with the Pleistocene Blues Again.

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