In Donald R. Prothero’s account of the eruption of Toba that affected your life, he quotes Pliny the Younger. * Yeah, I’ll get back to that “affected your life” later, but first here’s a line from Prothero’s translation of Pliny’s Latin that applies to more than just a population fleeing from a violent volcanic eruption. Pliny wrote to Tacitus to recount his escape from the 79 A.D. ** eruption of Vesuvius:
"We were followed by a panic-stricken mob of people wanting to act on someone else’s decision in preference to their own (a point in which fear looks like prudence) who hurried us on our way by pressing hard behind in the dense crowd." (33)
Pliny obviously escaped the eruption and the crush of the fleeing mob, and his detailed description of the that horrific event that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum is the reason that we now call such eruptions “Plinian.” The physical details of the eruption, however, are not what interest me here. It’s that sentence about how people acted in the panic that catches my attention. It’s in that context that I thought of how in our contemporary times, we, too, can act “on someone else’s decision in preference” to our own and how in acting on the preference of others we are shaping the future of our species.
Now, a situation that causes panic isn’t an ordinary one, and hopefully, you and I will never encounter a situation in which we desperately try to save our lives and the lives of our loved ones (Pliny fled with his mother). But I think we might pause a moment to consider how often and in what circumstances we—yes, you and I—“act on someone else’s decision in preference to” our own. Let’s start simply.
We walk past a crowd of people staring at the sky. We look, don’t we? It’s human to look, and probably that turning of our heads is a safety mechanism built into our genes, like prairie gophers or meerkats all looking toward a danger first perceived by a single member. Not to turn our heads to see what attracts the attention of others might invite injury or death. We survive by paying attention to an alert.
In Pliny’s case, panic overwhelmed the people. It was dark under the cloud of pyroclastics and settling ash. The ground was shaking and the ocean boiling both figuratively and actually. Buildings were collapsing. Not good times for anyone in the vicinity of Vesuvius. So, people running hither and thither would have been natural since those on the ground had no way of knowing the extent of the danger and the direction of true safety. We can’t really blame a people who had no science called volcanology and whose culture had forgotten the previous eruption of Vesuvius 296 years earlier. They ran like headless chickens from whose necks blood erupts.
But let’s get back to that “in preference to” in Pliny’s account. Take whatever panic you want: The Salem Witch Trials, the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, Al Gore’s rising seas, the suicides of people in Jonestown or in Heaven’s Gate, the actions of spring breakers, or any of an almost uncountable number of circumstances, incidents, or proclamations that have people acting on someone else’s decision in preference to their own. Each of us now faces a world of ostensible eruptions and ensuing panic. Despite our supposed literacy and education, we are apparently little different from the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum fleeing a violent volcano. And every such “eruption” creates a bottleneck on the other end of which a different mindset emerges, a new mindset that sets humanity off in a different direction.
So, someone spews the pyroclastics of warnings: “The climate is changing”; “The disease is spreading”; “The….” You get it. And yesterday, the Ides of March, 2019 C.E., saw high school children skipping classes to “save the planet” from climate change, the same students who will use electronic equipment, air-conditioned buildings and homes, running city water supplies, cars, toilet paper, and concert venues strewn with abandoned garbage, all without seeing a relationship between the direction they run in protest and the direction of their daily lives, and all running about according to the preference of others. But it’s not just the young that run as someone else dictates. Adults, also.
The running like headless chickens is the product of inexperience, limited perspective, and lack of knowledge. Again, I can’t fault the Pompeiians for their panic. They thought angry gods were at work, the sky was dark, debris was falling, choking ash filled the air, and the ground was shaking. The crowd was moving in the direction toward apparent safety. But I can fault myself. And I can fault all around me for panicking when the loudest voices start shouting the directions we follow in preference to our own.
Prothero’s book is about the largest eruption in the last 28 million years, the eruption of Toba some 74,000 years ago. That eruption might have caused a bottleneck in human evolution, a partial extinction that left survivors to procreate the current line of descendants that includes you and me. The direction of humanity was determined by a few survivors if the hypothesis about Toba’s effect on human destiny is true.
And now we have a different kind of eruptive event, the eruption of information—both true and false—that causes panic and determines the direction of humanity. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are acting on our own preference that is the product of knowledge or on the preference of others, many of who might be running in the darkness of partial knowledge. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are running like headless chickens beneath a dark sky, or even whether or not we are following headless chickens erupting the blood of panic from places that once housed heads with brains.
Because of our penchant to follow the panicked crowd, we are always at a potential bottleneck of human destiny.
*Prothero, Donald R. When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano. Washington, D. C. Smithsonian Books, 2018.
** “C.E.” for those afraid to mention anything that hints of religion while still using Christ’s birth as a starting date. “Common Era” appears to be acceptable, whereas Anno Domini (“in the year of our Lord”) isn’t though both begin with the approximate year of Christ’s birth. Strange mental contortions of the “wise,” right? As though writing C.E. is somehow more “scientific” than the other. Similarly, B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) replaces B.C. (“Before Christ”). So, the date of Caesar’s assassination, the Ides of March in 44 occurs as 44 B.C.E. and not 44 B.C.—Wow! That sure makes a difference.
"We were followed by a panic-stricken mob of people wanting to act on someone else’s decision in preference to their own (a point in which fear looks like prudence) who hurried us on our way by pressing hard behind in the dense crowd." (33)
Pliny obviously escaped the eruption and the crush of the fleeing mob, and his detailed description of the that horrific event that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum is the reason that we now call such eruptions “Plinian.” The physical details of the eruption, however, are not what interest me here. It’s that sentence about how people acted in the panic that catches my attention. It’s in that context that I thought of how in our contemporary times, we, too, can act “on someone else’s decision in preference” to our own and how in acting on the preference of others we are shaping the future of our species.
Now, a situation that causes panic isn’t an ordinary one, and hopefully, you and I will never encounter a situation in which we desperately try to save our lives and the lives of our loved ones (Pliny fled with his mother). But I think we might pause a moment to consider how often and in what circumstances we—yes, you and I—“act on someone else’s decision in preference to” our own. Let’s start simply.
We walk past a crowd of people staring at the sky. We look, don’t we? It’s human to look, and probably that turning of our heads is a safety mechanism built into our genes, like prairie gophers or meerkats all looking toward a danger first perceived by a single member. Not to turn our heads to see what attracts the attention of others might invite injury or death. We survive by paying attention to an alert.
In Pliny’s case, panic overwhelmed the people. It was dark under the cloud of pyroclastics and settling ash. The ground was shaking and the ocean boiling both figuratively and actually. Buildings were collapsing. Not good times for anyone in the vicinity of Vesuvius. So, people running hither and thither would have been natural since those on the ground had no way of knowing the extent of the danger and the direction of true safety. We can’t really blame a people who had no science called volcanology and whose culture had forgotten the previous eruption of Vesuvius 296 years earlier. They ran like headless chickens from whose necks blood erupts.
But let’s get back to that “in preference to” in Pliny’s account. Take whatever panic you want: The Salem Witch Trials, the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, Al Gore’s rising seas, the suicides of people in Jonestown or in Heaven’s Gate, the actions of spring breakers, or any of an almost uncountable number of circumstances, incidents, or proclamations that have people acting on someone else’s decision in preference to their own. Each of us now faces a world of ostensible eruptions and ensuing panic. Despite our supposed literacy and education, we are apparently little different from the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum fleeing a violent volcano. And every such “eruption” creates a bottleneck on the other end of which a different mindset emerges, a new mindset that sets humanity off in a different direction.
So, someone spews the pyroclastics of warnings: “The climate is changing”; “The disease is spreading”; “The….” You get it. And yesterday, the Ides of March, 2019 C.E., saw high school children skipping classes to “save the planet” from climate change, the same students who will use electronic equipment, air-conditioned buildings and homes, running city water supplies, cars, toilet paper, and concert venues strewn with abandoned garbage, all without seeing a relationship between the direction they run in protest and the direction of their daily lives, and all running about according to the preference of others. But it’s not just the young that run as someone else dictates. Adults, also.
The running like headless chickens is the product of inexperience, limited perspective, and lack of knowledge. Again, I can’t fault the Pompeiians for their panic. They thought angry gods were at work, the sky was dark, debris was falling, choking ash filled the air, and the ground was shaking. The crowd was moving in the direction toward apparent safety. But I can fault myself. And I can fault all around me for panicking when the loudest voices start shouting the directions we follow in preference to our own.
Prothero’s book is about the largest eruption in the last 28 million years, the eruption of Toba some 74,000 years ago. That eruption might have caused a bottleneck in human evolution, a partial extinction that left survivors to procreate the current line of descendants that includes you and me. The direction of humanity was determined by a few survivors if the hypothesis about Toba’s effect on human destiny is true.
And now we have a different kind of eruptive event, the eruption of information—both true and false—that causes panic and determines the direction of humanity. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are acting on our own preference that is the product of knowledge or on the preference of others, many of who might be running in the darkness of partial knowledge. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are running like headless chickens beneath a dark sky, or even whether or not we are following headless chickens erupting the blood of panic from places that once housed heads with brains.
Because of our penchant to follow the panicked crowd, we are always at a potential bottleneck of human destiny.
*Prothero, Donald R. When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano. Washington, D. C. Smithsonian Books, 2018.
** “C.E.” for those afraid to mention anything that hints of religion while still using Christ’s birth as a starting date. “Common Era” appears to be acceptable, whereas Anno Domini (“in the year of our Lord”) isn’t though both begin with the approximate year of Christ’s birth. Strange mental contortions of the “wise,” right? As though writing C.E. is somehow more “scientific” than the other. Similarly, B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) replaces B.C. (“Before Christ”). So, the date of Caesar’s assassination, the Ides of March in 44 occurs as 44 B.C.E. and not 44 B.C.—Wow! That sure makes a difference.
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