PIG2K

[Originally published in the Porkopolis Notebook in 2000.]

Pigs and the Millennium

As science or religious conversion become fashionable short–cuts to the millennium, the reality is that technological advances of the 20th century in preservation of information and bio–genetic material have made it possible to preserve most any person, place or thing …almost any animal, vegetable or mineral. Compared with what is extant from the last 90,000 years of the life of pig and man, future generations of both will have access to a far superior quantity of data and detritus from their past.

Will this information base lead to the hoped for thousand-year period of holiness, joy, prosperity, and justice touted by so many? A period during which ‘the faithful’ are to rule on earth. Right now, when even in our most prosperous countries, the quality of human life does not keep pace with our flourishing knowledge of its psycho-biotic mechanisms, the post millennial future of pig and man is at best uncertain.

We can say that throughout their association, pig and man frequently seem unlikely associates: prone to each others sickness; disrespectful and quarrelsome with their own and each others kind; ill-adapted to stairwells and ill-mannered when interrupted at meals; but if that is all their association has been, then both would have abandon it, and perhaps this world as well, millenniums ago. Yet, neither has.

Pig and man are both changing, what may be true for our shared future is that we are eternally anchored to each other by new ways of understanding life. Sophistry and window-shopping on the future are not sufficient acts to absolve the end of this century and millennium. It is what is being discovered over and over about how the soul survives its biographers that will lead pig and man toward the hinterlands of their associations in the sweet by-and-by of wallowing pools, weightlessness and web sites.