The nationalisms of Shikasta, that pernicious new creed which uses much of the energies that once fed religions, are strong, and new nations are born every day. And with each, a generation of its young men and women steps forward ready to die for the chimera. And, whereas so recently, not more than a generation, or two generations, it was possible for a Shikastan to spend a life thinking not much further than a village, or a town, only just able to grasp the concept of "nation" - now, while "nation" is strong, devouring, so is the idea of the whole world, as an interacting whole. To die for a country cannot have the conviction it did. So recently, a hundred years ago, or fifty, it was possible for the members of a nation to believe that this little patch of Shikasta was better than all others, more noble, free, and good. But recently even the most self-regarding and self-worshipping nation has had to see that it is the same as the rest, and that each lies, tortures, deludes its people, and bleeds them in the interests of a dominant class... and falls apart, as must happen in these terrible end days.
Politics, political parties, which attract exactly the same emotions as religions did and do, as nations did and do, spawn new creeds every day. Not long ago it was possible for members of a political sect to believe that it was pristine and noble and best - but there have been so many betrayals and disappointments, lies, turnings-about, so much murdering and torturing and insanity, that even the most fanatic supporters know times of disbelief.
Science, the most recent of the religions, as bigoted and as inflexible as any, has created a way of life, a technology, attitudes of mind, increasingly loathed and distrusted. Not long ago, a "scientist" knew he was the great culminator and crown of all human thinking, knowledge, progress - and behaved with according arrogance. But now they begin to know their own smallness, and the fouled and spoiled earth itself rises up against them in witness.
Everywhere ideas, sets of mind, beliefs that have supported people for centuries are fraying away, dissolving, going.
What is there left?
It is true that the capacity of Shikastans to restore the breaches in the walls of their certainties is immense. The exposed and painful nature of their existence, subject to myriad chances beyond their control or influence, their helplessness as they toss in the cosmic storms, the violences and discordances of their damaged minds - all this being intolerable, they still hide their eyes and pray, or add to the formulas in their laboratories.
Each one of these alliances of an individual with some greater whole, the identification of an individual with a mental structure larger than himself, was a drug, a prop, a pacifier for children. These were greater even than alcohol and opium and the rest, but they are going, thinning, dissolving, and the insensate and furious, fanatical and desperate struggles that go on in the name of this or that creed or belief, the very fury, is a means of stilling self-doubt, numbing the terrors of isolation.
What other ways have Shikastans used to ward off from themselves the knowledge about their situation which is always, always threatening to well up from their depths and overwhelm? What else can they clutch to them, like a blanket on a cold night?
There are the varieties of pleasure, implanted in them for the sake of their survival, the needs for food and sex which, as the whole species is threatened, rage in an instinctive effort to save and preserve.
There is something else, and stronger than anything: the well-being, the always renewing, regenerative, healing force of nature; feeling one with the other creatures of Shikasta and its soil, and its plants.
The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans, will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot - not this time - harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta.
Forced back and back upon herself, himself, bereft of comfort, security, knowing perhaps only hunger and cold; denuded of belief in "country," "religion," "progress" - stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let his eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness - a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again... and in war, a soldier watching a tank rear up over a ridge to bear down on him, will see as he dies grass, tree, a bird swerving past, and know immortality.
It is here, precisely here, that I place my emphasis.
Now it is only for a few of the creatures of Shikasta, those with steadier sight, or nerves, but every day there are more - soon there will be multitudes... once where the deepest, most constant, steadiest support was, there is nothing: it is the nursery of life itself that is poisoned, the seeds of life, the springs that feed the well.
All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.
She reaches for the child that plays on the floor but as she holds its fresh warmth to her face she knows that it is for the holocaust, and if by a miracle it escapes, then the substance of its inheritance is being attacked as the two of them stand there, close, the warmth of their mortality beating between them as the child laughs.
He looks at the child, thinking of nature, the creative fire spawning new forms as we breathe. He has to, for he knows that the species dwindle everywhere on Shikasta, the stock of gene patterns is being destroyed, destroyed, cannot come back... He cannot rest in thoughts of the great creator, nature, and he looks out of the window at a landscape seen a thousand times, in a thousand different guises, but now it seems to thin and disappear. He thinks: Well, the ice stretched down as far as here, not so long ago, ten thousand years, and look, it has all remade itself! But an ice age is nothing, it is a few thousand years - the ice comes, and then it goes. It destroys and kills, but it does not pervert and spoil the substance of life itself.
She thinks, but there are the animals, the noble and patient animals, with their languages we don't understand, their kindness to each other, their friendship for us - and she puts down her hand to feel the living warmth of her little cat but knows that as she stands there they are being slaughtered, wiped out, made extinct, by senselessless, stupidity, by greed, greed, greed. She cannot rest in her familiar thoughts of the great reservoir of nature, and when her cat gives birth, she crouches over the nest and peers in, looking for the mutations which she knows are working there, will soon show themselves.
He thinks, as the loneliness of his situation dizzies him, standing there and whirling among the stars, a species among myriads - as he has only recently come to know - that these thoughts are too grand for him, he needs to put his arms around his woman and to feel her arms around him, but as they turn to each other, there is tension, and fear, for this embrace may breed monsters.
She stands as she has done for millennia, cutting bread, setting out sliced vegetables on a plate, with a bottle of wine, and thinks that nothing in this meal is safe, that the poisons of their civilisation are in every mouthful, and that they are about to fill their mouths with deaths of all kinds. In an instinctive gesture of safety, renewal, she hands a piece of bread to her child, but the gesture has lost its faith as she makes it, because of what she may be handing the child.