A World Without Thunder

On Thunderstorms

Thunderstorms are one of my favorite things; my parents think I’m crazy, but I just stand outside and sing while the rain comes pouring down. I love thunderstorms because of their raw power, their inattention to the little lines we draw on our maps, their ability to overwhelm us and remind us of how large the world really is. I love them because when I’m caught up in them, I’m not a Naval officer or a Harvard alumni or even a blogger – I’m just a woman standing, singing, drenched in rain.

There is thunder in all sorts of places in this world. It’s in nature – in the sheer magnitude of the stars and the sky. It’s in philosophy – in our ability to understand the purpose and patterns in the universe. It’s in history – great men shaping the course of the future and making decisions that reverberate thousands of years after they die. And it’s in you – yes, you. The ability to make decisions, real decisions with real consequences, that will matter forever.

This is the world our ancestors lived in – a world of heroes and battles and kings, a world full of things worth fighting for, worth dying for. A world where anything could happen, a world that was governed by man, but was too large to be controlled by him. A world where history moved in a definite direction, shaped by cataclysmic events. But that world is now almost gone.

A World Without Thunder

We are living today in a world without thunder, without ideals or momentous choices. We are living in a world of arbitrary values and decisions, unable to separate ourselves from our inbred predilections and tendencies. The days of heroes are over; we wonder now if there were ever any heroes at all. All the great men of history have been stained by the sins of their time, or else set so far above history that they are no longer real men at all. If we look to the social sciences, they tell us that everything is a response to stimuli – if the economy is doing so well, and foreign policy is doing so well, you’ll vote this way. Individual beliefs don’t come into it.

History has become a soggy drizzle, with none of the roaring tempests or tumultuous blasts that define ages, roaring across land and sea, transcending borders without regard for the petty, passing artifices of man. The course of the world has become a long tome one must slog through with no affection for the characters and no interest in the plot, a haze of lust and violence thinly veiling an insipid lack of content. Much modern fiction evinces this pattern (not always unintentionally).

The world shrinks further if we turn to the hard sciences. Everything can be explained by physical forces, by the state of your digestion and the state of your upbringing, by the speed of the neurons in your brain. There is no room left for heroism or humanity; there is only response to stimuli, cause-and-effect without the need for will or thought. Listen to the thunder, primitive and inexorable. Borders, treaties, speeches, mean nothing to it: it roams across borders without so much as a pause, reminding us how small all our defenses are, how short our ramparts, how thin our walls! What can we do, in the end?

The Human Spirit

But you see, this is backwards. We should not say that nature is large, and man is small, and so nature must be over man. We must look instead at what man can do that nature cannot – we must look at dreams and thought and will and choice and identity. We must look at love, and hope, and all the ambitions and ideals embodied in our heritages and stories. We must look at our ability to comprehend nature, to see patterns, and to shape and change the course of the world. We must look not only at the sciences, but at history and philosophy and literature and art – and we must conclude that man goes over and beyond nature.

When I was touring Washington D.C., I found two different answers to the question “what does it mean to be human?” One came from the Museum of Natural History, and included such things as opposable thumbs and walking on two legs – categories of nature. The other description I encountered at the World War II memorial, discussing the battle of Midway.

They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed

the course of a war…even against the greatest of odds, there is

something in the human spirit – a magic blend of skill, faith and

valor – that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.

This, I believe, is the truer of the two answers. There is a great deal that the scientific description leaves out. We must conclude, then, that man is over nature, that he can defy what nature says he can and cannot do, and come out victorious. We must agree with the traditions that man has held for thousands of years, and conclude that man is lord over nature, is greater than nature. And so the reasoning runs thus: nature is large, and man is over nature, so man must be large.

Nature goes beyond our artifices, our borders and buttresses, our treaties and tax codes, our payrolls and promotions. And so must we also. Nature calls to remembrance the high and unbounded nature of man, before he lost himself in dusty rulebooks and stiffly-worded treaties. This is a world not of rules and laws and agreements, but of men who established these, and of cultures and ideas and beliefs that roll crashing over borders and constitutions with all the ease of a summer thunderstorm.

The Real World

The “real world” is nothing but a construction, an illusion. Grades and promotions and checkbook balances, lists of numbers on sheets of paper, have their place and their importance, but they should not be allowed to displace our deepest hopes and ideals. Because ideals are not constructions. But that’s a discussion for another time.

History is not a drizzle. It is a summer storm, with great men, heroes (the term is sorely overused now) who moved history in their wake, moments that altered the course of the world. The days of quests, wars, and heroes are not in fairyland only; they are still here. The same storms that rolled over Abraham, Achilles, and Alexander still thunder over the land today. And the same restless nature stirs inside man, waiting to be restored to its rightful place. It is only the borders, the paper walls, that have changed. And what can they do, in the end?

photo: By Simon Q (Flickr: Lightning Strikes) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons