The manic urge to build
It's what humans do
I can always feel the steady march of nature in the dripping calm after a rainstorm. Stand for awhile and watch the patient, stubborn weeds heaving the sidewalks in half. Feel the slight sponginess of the concrete sidewalk as it is invaded in its million tiny pores. Observe, in untended areas, the choking glut of jasmine, or kudzu, or coral honeysuckle, softening every hard edge and obscuring every distinct thing. Every summer, when things grow, we are reminded again how contingent our human civilization is. Each generation of humans brooms back the encroaching waters, trims back the enclosing vines, wrenches free from the soft suffocating grasp of nature our places of habitation, work, and worship. And every summer of human existence has seen the same battle of culture and nature.
Nature is a peculiar thing. For all its choking power, it is always in "energy-saver" mode. Predators conserve every calorie of energy in their body, lying inert and watchful until an expenditure of energy can guarantee its next source of calories. Its prey moves furtively, timidly, always gathering, hoarding, conserving, for when the bad times come or when its every fiber must be engaged to survive. There is a profound slackness and slouch to nature at rest, punctuated only by frenzied expulsions of energy to gain some advantage: to push your leaves above the canopy to the waiting sun, or to bring down prey, to colonize some rare food source, or to woo a mate. Barring these exceptions, nature languishes. Perhaps it is the combination of its recumbent attitude and quiet relentlessness that can give us, in unguarded moments, a hint of sublime terror that we will be swallowed up.
Like nature, humans have a lazy streak. You can very reliably track the march of history by only studying the tools and technologies we make to get more from less. The wheel is a more efficient way to expend energy to do work. So too are dams, hand tools, cranks, pulleys, water wheels, fire, petroleum, steam, and nuclear fission: clever ways to get more work done with less effort. But the development of these technologies took incredible effort, time, risk, and the fruitless expenditure of energy. It is because, unlike nature, our psychology is complicated by something else: the manic urge to build.
Imagine you are a lost hiker on a mountain range in a dense bank of fog. You know that, when the fog clears, you are likelier to be spotted by rescuers if you are sitting at the highest point in the mountain range. You might find what seems like the highest peak, but be completely unaware that a much higher promontory is just across the next valley. Let’s call any one of these many peaks a "local optimum"—it's the best one in the area, but you have no idea if it is the actual best spot to be rescued from, the "global optimum."
Nature settles: it will crawl to the nearest peak, but it won't venture beyond what is the best position within its context. Humans will find the local optimum, too. We're good at that. But part of our birthright (and, perhaps our curse) is that we are always casting about for a global optimum. There is no peak so high that we won't wonder if another, higher one is waiting for us in the fog.
This is why Polynesians settled impossibly remote islands. It is why we were not content with just the wheel, or the pulley, or fire, and worked at it until we now have central heating and tower cranes and nuclear fission. It is why there is a flag on the moon and a golden tablet hurtling into deep space. Enough of us are not satisfied with the hill we're on because there might be a higher one somewhere else. Somehow, this desire is powerful enough to overcome the languid torpor of our vegetable nature and build, discover, invent, and conquer.
I said before that nature is lazy. But there is one place in nature where you can find find 'the manic urge to build': cancer. At the cellular level, nature is at war with itself. One set of genes, 'oncogenes,' are needed to promote the growth and multiplication of cells. Another set, called tumor suppressor genes (TSG), regulate and inhibit cell replication. Cells become cancerous when either of these warring camps of genes starts to malfunction. Oncogene malfunction can accelerate cell reproduction, overwhelming the TSG's mechanisms. And if a TSG malfunctions, it can either cause it to regulate cell reproduction less, or in some cases even make it promote cell reproduction instead. The fancy name for cancer is a malignant neoplasm, literally a 'new creation.' We love new creations.
At the civilizational level, humans have always had oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Some are psychological: embedded within our nature is a natural conservatism with energy, effort, time, commitment, and collaboration. Some of these are humans themselves. Ferdinand Magellan is your prototypical oncogene. Others are institutional: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an example par excellence of a (sometimes literal!) tumor suppressor gene on the national scale. Still others are fundamental laws of physics or acts of God: we still haven't found a room-temperature superconductor; the human body cannot sustain extremely high G-forces; you can only build a tower so high before God confuses your language or the structures simply sway too much to be comfortable.
I wish to advance several conclusions from this admittedly strange analogy:
First, it should be obvious that, at this macro level, the growth and regulation 'genes' embedded in our psychology, our citizens, and our institutions should be tuned for productive growth, not malignity. We need both. It is obvious when one or the other of these society-scaled genes have mutated: the widespread sclerosis of latter-day American institutions is one pole; the rapid proliferation of weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War is another. What is harder is achieving a balance.
Second, we should be very careful especially of advancements that make 'metastasis' (the spreading of out-of-control cells) too rapid. Think of the progress of cancer through the interconnected vessels of the lung. Among its many other qualities, media makes psychological genes spread and mutate. Media that is immediate, ubiquitous, immersive, and all-encompassing (the logical endpoint of the social and mass media of the day) forms the perfect network for the instantaneous metastasis of what Richard Dawkins called memes: easily-transmissible cultural ideas and frames, not to mention funny image macros.
Finally, we should not be so binary about our our descriptions of ourselves and others. I have so far implied that a person is either a human cancer cell or a human cancer fighter. For civilizations, perhaps this is true in broad strokes. But among individuals, that is a gross oversimplification. In the same way that we contain in every one of our cells both kinds of biological genes, so to do we carry both the energy-conserving minimalism of nature and the exuberant itch to progress of the human. The manic builder would be achieve a better and less destructive personal balance by recognizing and enjoying the regulatory confines of their own need for sleep, the goodness of unchosen obligations, and the vastness and incomprehensibility of the universe. On the other hand, the human languishing in the soft prison of their own torpidity could stand to have a fire lit under them: to feel the deep satisfaction of creating something; to enjoy the thrill of discovery; to push back the boundaries of the known universe. Everyone will fall in a different place on the spectrum between mania and torpor. For our own good, finding growth without civilizational metastasis will require a little of both. And individually, let us build like a developing body, not a spreading cancer.