The Ship of Fools

Sebastian Brant was a medieval German humanist and artist who is best known for his book Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), the most popular German literary work of the 15th century.

His book, which must have touched a nerve, tells of a ship laden with fools and steered by fools that is sailing for Narragonia (Fools’ Paradise).

Brant exposed the shortcomings of more than 100 types ranging from criminals, drunkards, ill-behaved priests, lecherous monks, busybodies, to voluptuous women, and many others. He achieved a literary success, but failed to improve people, as subsequent events showed.

The woodcuts that precede each chapter, many cuts ascribed to Albrecht Dürer, helped to make the book popular.

In the woodcut shown here, the passengers and crew of the Narrenschiff are making merry while the ship sails on to its doom. Sound familiar?

The allegory, which is timeless, holds up to us the tragi-comedy of human beings, who have no care for the morrow and think only of their own pleasure.

Voltaire remarked that we will leave the world in just as sorry a state as it was when we entered it.

Tucker Carlson, popular Fox News commentator, published a book with the same title that describes how America’s political elites are bringing the country to the brink of revolution.

The Ship of Fools has been able to continue on its journey despite the stupidity and shortsightedness of the passengers and crew because it was not overloaded and the seas were not rough.

Buckminster Fuller in an address at MIT in 1979 introduced a new metaphor – Spaceship Earth – that brought Brant’s allegory up to date. . In his many books Fuller tried to make people aware of our Earth (Earth. Inc.) as a spaceship racing forward with the solar system and the galaxy at a dizzying speed that we don’t feel because we think we are standing or sitting still.

Our spaceship has been provided with enough resources to last the passengers for a very long journey if they are husbanded, but many of these resources are not renewable. If we run out, it’s game over. There isn’t any place outside the spaceship to get more.

Air and water are vital to life but exist only in finite qantities.

Contrary to what many people think, the air that we breathe is limited in quantity. It is composed of many gases, most important of which is oxygen, which makes up about 21% of the atmosphere. Oxygen is produced by plants in the process called photosynthesis, by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize nutrients from carbon dioxide and water. Photosynthesis in plants involves the green pigment chlorophyll and generates oxygen as a waste product. One billion years ago the surface of the Earth became covered with plants, which were threatened with suffocation because oxygen is toxic for them. Nature averted the catastrophe by creating organisms that breathe in the oxygen that is poisonous for plants. Since that time, the plant and animal worlds have existed in a delicate symbiosis. But a new crisis is imminent.

The more people and fewer plants there are, the more likely that humanity will suffer an oxygen deficit down the road. When? That’s hard to say, but it’s inevitable. What happens then? It will be too late to plant trees.

Earth seems big to us, but in fact in the Universe it is no more than a grain of sand in the Sahara.

The passengers of Space Ship Earth must be made aware that they are all in it together. That fellow feeling thus far has been lacking, and in the end individual and collective egoism may doom the human race. Ants, bees, and other social insects work together for the common good. Hate is a luxury we cannot afford.

Is the concept of the nation-state obsolete? Should states be allowed (who will stop them?) to do whatever they wish with resources on their territory that affect the planet and its inhabitants as a whole?

Should a rogue state like Brazil be permitted to destroy the Amazon rainforest that produces one-fifth of Earth’s oxygen? When one fire dies out, the peasants start another one to grab more land.

Why should a country like the United States, which comprises five-perent of the world’s population, consume twenty-five percent of Earth’s resources, when Germany consumes half as much per person to achieve a similar lifestyle? America is a big fat hog at the world’s dining table.

George W. Bush said that America’s lifestyle is nonnegotiable. Is waste nonnegotiable?

In the 1940s, Wendell Wilkie, a liberal Republican, advocated World Federalism and campaigned for president under its banner.

His defeat proved that the nations of the world are not ready to abandon even a shred of their sovereignty for the common good (and theirs, too, in the long run), and Brant’s Ship of Fools, like Odysseus’s Black Ship to Hell, will continue to sail on to its final doom. The passengers of Spaceship Earth are in a worse predicament than the passengers of The Titanic because there aren’t even any lifeboats for them.