Cogito ergo non sum

Existential nullification

I had a dream last week that ended the way my dreams of this sort always end. I was in a car driven by someone else. That person died and the car hurtled over a cliff. I remember the feeling of free fall. But before the car hit the ground, I awoke.

I don't have these dreams of impending death often. But when I do, I never die. I don't know why this is so. Yet from this I have formulated the fundamental law of my dreams: In my dreams I cannot die. More precisely, I cannot imagine my non-existence.

Perhaps this law doesn't apply to people who firmly believe in an afterlife. I don't know. But for me it parallels something I've  often thought about regarding history. Can one legitimately argue for an alternative history that does not include the existence of the person doing the arguing?

It comes up all the time in discussions of European policy toward American Indians. The world would have been a better place if the Europeans had stayed put and left the Indians to themselves, many people argue. Or at least that’s the implication of the common contention that Columbus and those who came after him committed genocide against the peoples of the Americas. The problem with this argument, when made by any American of European, African or Asian descent, is that in this scenario the Columbus critics likely would not exist. Their forebears would have stayed in Europe, Africa or Asia, where conditions of health were much poorer than in America, and would have had many fewer descendants.

There are other problems with the no-Columbus scenario. Would the indigenous peoples of the Americas still be living a neolithic existence? But the existential contradiction is the one that currently intrigues me the most.

The 1619 Project is premised on the idea that Africans should not have been brought as slaves to America. This is an eminently defensible position. But its inescapable corollary is that Africans would not have been brought to America at all. And the great majority of those who identify as African Americans today would not exist or would be Nigerian, Ghanaian or other West African.

A spinoff of the 1619 Project is a revived campaign for reparations for descendants of slaves. The presumption is that the descendants would be better off materially in the absence of slavery. But would they? They either wouldn't exist or they would live in a country much poorer than America.

Some people disenchanted with technology think humanity took a wrong turn at the agricultural revolution ten millennia ago or the industrial revolution two centuries ago. But those revolutions made possible the enormous increase in human populations since then. Without them 99 percent of us today wouldn't be alive. Do the critics suppose they'd be in the 1 percent?

Maybe they don't care. Some of them doubtless would be happy imagining an earth untrammeled by human footprints. They’d be willing to forgo their existence in exchange for an idea of unspoiled nature. But the transaction is vexed with inconsistency. Who would be doing the forgoing? Who would be conceiving the idea?

This whole exercise is mostly hypothetical. But not entirely. If nothing else, it's a reminder that everything in life comes with strings. The good and the bad are knotted together inextricably. If you start pulling strings to eliminate the bad, the good unravels too.

Appreciate the tapestry for what it is. When you make your own, aim for perfection. But don’t expect to achieve it.