Chris Jepson: Whatever is does not have to be

Everything is a human construct. All of our material possessions, how we organize society and govern ourselves, our economic system, religion, our personal relationships (marriage/family), what we deem relevant and important, our values, everything associated with being human is the result of our (historical) actions. Such awareness begs the question, “Is this the best we can do?”

One of my favorite jazz songs is “Compared to What,” by Les McCann and Eddie Harris. It’s off their 1969 album, “Swiss Movement.” The chorus rocks with, “Tryin’ to make it real compared to what.” When I ask, “Is this the best we can do?” it is within the context of, “compared to what?”

I’ve been reading history in large doses since the late 1960s when I finished my undergraduate degree and began my master’s in history. Our history is accessible. With a little perseverance the “average” person can get their minds around our story. Depending on “current” theory, we started walking out of Africa anywhere from 60,000 to 125,000 years ago. We started writing down “our story” approximately 5,000 years ago.

I remember when I first read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic, “Foundation.” One of the themes of his book is the inexorable spread of humanity, that we’d been at it, off-earth (populating the “known” universe) for hundreds of thousands of years. Imagine trying to have any historical grasp of our species if we had to deal with that amount of time passing. But we don’t, we have, at best, 5,000 years of texts (accounts) and, oh, say 40,000 years of art (symbols) of our species. It’s unequivocally knowable, our story.

And what a slog it has been. From isolated individual “family” units, to tribes, to city-states, to nations and empires, and all manner of “governance” in between. All of it we made up as we went along. Through trial and error it was so many steps forward with so many steps backward. Undeniably, along the way, we’ve pursued better governance.

We have documents dating to approximately 2400 B.C. of one of the first legal codes from the reign of Urukagina in Mesopotamia. Know what? They were dealing with problems similar to our own, limiting both religious authority as well as that of large property owners. Some historians also assert that Urukagina’s Code records the first written examples of the degradation of women. Ah, two steps forward, two steps backward.

So here we are in America some 4,500 years since the reign of Urukagina, governed by the longest-running democracy in the history of our species. Everyday the United States exists is another one for the record books. America has done, comparatively speaking, a laudable job of providing “rights” and opportunities for a lot of its citizens – that is if you didn’t have the misfortune of being a minority or poor.

Right now our democracy is so ineffectual and polarized I fear for America’s future. It’s as if some dystopian, bastardized version of Orwell’s “1984” is in the ascendancy, of nation states, of people supplanted by their corporate “citizens.” We will all lose.

We watch Nero (our representative democracy) fiddle as Rome (America) burns. Nothing lasts. People. Nations. Stars. We all feel this. But it’s profoundly disturbing when citizens begin wondering, “Will I or America succumb first?”

Yes, America is a human construct. But must we step backward, uh, rightward? Can we not be better, compared to what we might imagine? Whatever is does not have to be.