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Wednesday, November 1, 2023

A deceased mathematician, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick, replies to a pontificating venture capitalist, Mark Andreesen, about the state of humanity.

I don’t believe Andreesen has actually graced us with his thoughts on humanity as a whole, but I’m taking his recent capacious The Techno-Optimist Manifesto as a proxy for those thoughts. As for Yevick, while she died in 2018, I can readily imagine that she would have had quite a bit to say in response to Andreesen. And for all I know, somewhere in her papers we might find something she had said about him, for it is highly likely that she knew who he was.

What I can say for sure, having by now read quite a bit of her work, is that she cared and thought deeply about humanity, both past and future. Back in 2013 she made a few entries in a blog. While the blog is no longer available on the open web, I was able to find it through the Wayback Machine. One entry, dated February 26, 2023, was a poem about humanity, from the beginnings up through the present and into the future. I’m reproducing that below. By way of analytic commentary, I ask you to compare the opening lines with the concluding lines.

* * * * *

Homo Sapiens

HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!
PROUD TO BE A SAPIENS HOMO SAPIENS.

(A Self-help poem)

First was the Word

“Darling! Darling!”
The mother exclaims, echoing the joy she felt
at her child’s moment of conception.
Now the newborn emerges, high its forehead
guardian of its birthright: intellect, consciousness and conscience,
unique among all species.

Unto us a Babe is born! One more
Sapiens Homo Sapiens of Homo Sapienses,
the only surviving species of our original ancestors.
Genetic blood brethren and sisters,
all of us.

Today is the birthday of the species.
“Hinei Ma Tov ou Manayim. Shevet Achim gam Yachad”
(How good it is to sit together with our brethren.)

Exultate! Jubilate! Rejoice! Rejoice!

Who are we then?

The simple, nameless herd of humanity
Hath deed and faith that art truth enough for me.
Euripides.

Ophra
John Armstrong.

John Lennon
Johan Sebastian Bach

The lady making change at the forty-second street subway station.
The woman with the spiked heels on Madison Avenue.

The Kahn Brothers
The Koch Brothers

Michaelangelo
Mark Ecko, the Graffiti artist at the forty-second street subway station.

Marie Antoinette
The Bag Woman begging at the forty second street subway station.

Albert Einstein
The Nameless stone age discoverer of the pressure-flaking technique.

Jesus Christ
Helen Keller

Mark Zuchkerberg
The woman sitting next to you on the subway train

Rupert Murdoch
Napoleon Bonaparte

Continue, go on, go complete the list.: your mother, your father, your great grand children, your great-grandfather… On and on, scoop them all up, up and down, right and left, one big genetic family. Is there completion either way?

“For on Calvary of Christ’s blood Christendom
                                               sprang.
Blood brethren became we there and gentlemen
                                              each one.”
Piers Plowman (Twelfth Century)

Not one of a nameless herd, but a proud Homo Sapiens, with a passion for distinction. You can pick them out, distinct one by one, among the millions clamoring for a life of dignity. You can see their faces in print.. ….You can find their names on Facebook to be your friends for life.

How long?

When timeless time was stagnant
with no human to observe it,
was the emerging little cell,
innocent of its destiny
guided by God, or Nature, or Evolution?
None cared.

Once, about one hundred thousand years ago, the silent void was rent and perhaps thirty thousand of the species Homo Sapiens stalked the earth. They stayed several tens of millennia, braved the changing climate, left us a few skeletons and disappeared. Time lost to us.

Give or take twenty millennia later, time’s stage was yielded once again to our immediate ancestors, the species Homo Sapiens – with another “Sapiens” tacked to its name – and dropped into the earth’s lap to step into the breach.

Hunting and fishing,
fashioning stone implements,
then bronze and iron ones,
tilling the soil, planting crops,
domesticating animals,
building altars and monuments
traveling and inventing,
learning and thinking …
as the millennia moved fast forward.

How many?

“Look at the heavens,” God said to Abraham, “and count its stars. Can you count them? That many will your offspring be.”

Not uncountable but one hundred ten billion members of our surviving human species have lived and peopled the earth until now. Seven billion of those are still alive to this very day. We can pair every ten of the latter with one of the two hundred million of our predecessors living in the year zero, two millennia ago, and cover the whole lot since. That is how close the ties are that bind our generations together.

Seven billion, 7 x 10^9 made of the same stuff as ourselves, the only ones who speak a human language, in the whole big universe with its 10^22 stars.
Can we afford to lose even a single one?

Do we care to disappear? To let the roaches rule the world?

What then have we wrought?

It is not God, or Nature or Evolution who have transformed the world. It is us ourselves.

The flag planted on the moon
The I pad
Stonehenge
The Pyramids
The Salk Vaccine
The Magna Charta
The Bill of Rights
The Scientific Method
Our Bible, Wikipedia
Our cathedral, the Verezano Bridge.

There is a bridge by the name Verezano
Floating on air, held up by
A harp of silver cables recasting
the radiating sun’s golden rays,
converging toward a slender arch,
a portal to lift our souls to heaven.

Last was the Word

We have culled the words of our language
From our common origins.
The groans and giggles of passion
morphed into the poetry of love,
and the primordial bond
hallowed in our last exclamation:
“Mamma!” Maman!” “Mutti!” “Ima!” “Mummy!” “ Mother!” “Mammele!”

Mother Earth, Mother dear, may our species live for
Ever and Ever!

 

Miriam Lipschutz-Yevick
Retired Associate Professor of Mathematics
Rutgers The State University
Copyright 2011

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