Human history, a jaw-dropping grab bag, blunts easy assessments, let alone presumptive superiority to one sect, tribe or mindset
Never before have privileged Americans faced such blatant, earth-shaking paradoxes and contradictions. Democratically-elected leader turns instant, untethered Dictator-in-chief. Bad news swamps good, justifiable evidence for an indictment against modern politics, indeed modernity itself. A population bomb plus climate change defiance only accelerates huge threats to whether the earth stays widely habitable. Many rightly posit democracy, not just in the US or the west, staggers. Despite stunning delusions about infinite growth and limitless resources, institutional efforts to self-limit excesses pale next to warlord resurgences to wall in wealth-friendly treasure troves.
Despite dominance for less than 10,000 years, our innovative, though erratic species commandeers the fate of all life on earth. That condition amplifies natural extinctions as selfish impulses, driving belligerent, tribal, racist predations, dramatize this simple question: how can we find the wisdom and power to even moderate abusive practices or squander the immense blessings bequeathed by the permanence of mass, nature, time and space. In short, can ethical and moral pressures, if not core self-interests, offset the extraordinary power to invent, then overuse earthshaking machinery?
Still poised between angels and animals?
In Shakespeare’s time humankind notched between virtuous angels and primitive, instinctive, snarling beasts. The Christian Renaissance depicted life as the perpetual tension wherein our free will made innumerable, permanent choices whether to rise or fall spiritually. Though terms change (like obsolete angels), history depicts a species dansing between immense, creative breakthroughs (in ideas, technology, science, art, human rights, and creature comforts) vs. irrepressible, destructive makers of wasteland (for power, wealth, conquest, or the delusion du jour). Humankind possesses an adult rational brain when creating and discovering, yet oddly comes packaged with a juvenile, animalistic “I want it now” personality disorder. That dark side invokes chaos, warfare, genocide and systemaic destruction, hypocritically violating the highest values, such as compassion, sharing, sacrifice and tolerance, ordained by its esteemed prophets. While democracy emanates from our highest values, empowered by declarations of universal human rights, reckless, ungoverned capitalism rules the roost, serving narcissistic egotism, insatiable greed and tyrannical power.
So, for a calm, meditational moment, recall the uplifting humanism voiced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! . . . In action, how like an Angel; in apprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
Behold the majestic grandeur of humanity – adventurous, conscious and visionary, marrying reason to judgment as when figuring out the mysteriously infinite size of the cosmos, wielding an imagination from the “beauty of the world.” All that from a species a hundred million years younger than sea turtles or sharks. Yet to fashion great art and the written word, the plough, the wheel and the computer, meant producing food surpluses from uncertain farming so innovators had time to ponder, imagine, then invent and figure out patterns. The extraordinary last two centuries broadcast the tool-making genius when brain, idea, hand and machinery are in sync. Yes, there are massive human trade-offs, bad unintended consequences, but more people escape abject poverty, with access to medicine and technology, than ever.
No history ignores disastrous forces, amplified by organizational systems, that engender slavery, genocide, paternalism and hierachical power structures. Thanks to the self-serving dictate to multiply and dominate nature (early manifest destiny), homo sapiens apply relentless drive, risk-taking and acquisitiveness, even when more than enough is rarely enough. Against Hamlet’s ideals, what country is free of unforgivable, seemingly unavoidable “inhumanity” that tests not just dominance but life itself. Even without more unspeakable war carnage, pandemics beyond Covid, volcanic eruptions and asteroids, we still face the daunting, daily challenges of securing sufficient food, clean water and breathable air.
Survival without widespread, value consensus?
One major, irrational nuclear nation can do irreparable damage to conditions on earth. Because traditional religious models of meaning and virtue no longer command the collective, both love and wisdom are ground down by corrosive self-interest, corporate profitability and endless manipulation of public communications. Where is the stabilizing value replacement that kept the world relatively steady in periods of peace and prosperity? Where is the independent, functional, global “meaning model” (like science-driven, secular humanism or agendas for greater equality of money, goods and rights) to provide belief systems that could restrain lower human appetites? Without a collective model, what hope is there to promote the now simple essential of earthly sustainability? Or else. Or else. Without mutual values and goals, cornered people will turn fear and powerlessness into cynicism and desperation, fostering authoritarian regimes or conviction the earth is doomed, the game already over. Such suicidal emptiness of values motivates Macbeth’s (not Shakespeare’s) stirring, epic wail of despair and desolation:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. . . . It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Today, the terrified and defenseless wither when ruthlessly charismatic exploiters trade off immediate, life-style comforts (for their crowd) with depleting, non-sustainable consumption epitomized by burning “cheap” (subsidized) fossil fuel. Nor have we abandoned dead-end reliance on religious violence, racial oppression, rights abuses, and conquest of neighbors to procure someone else’s land and resources, civilian deaths be damned. Bereft of cooperation and solidarity, Putin’s invasion expends hundreds of thousands of lives and billions in arms to destroy Ukraine “in order to save it” – from what? Self-government? If this vicious war fails, futility reigns; if it “works” by force, how long will a truce last?
Against such dark, destructive visions, look what only two centuries of science, technology, drug and medical breakthroughs award us, with astonishing life-style improvements for multitudes, whatever your mindset. Most earthlings live longer, with superior food, housing and transport, than in 1800. There are greater options for those once disregarded: women, minorities, uneducated kids, those with non-standard genders. Imagine being able to telephone or email over half of humanity, let alone learning in minutes what happens in remote backwaters. Count blessings for fridges, A/C, clothes washers and heaters that need no matches nor fire wood – only silent switches and energy. A world that communicates as never before can in theory come together as never before, with grassroots energy that could teach, then insist on sharing the collective wealth now concentrated “at the top.”
That means restraining power-mongers, no easy task
Marginally regulated, mammoth corporations now outpunch all but the largest countries. The justice system of laws, sworn to protect the people, is bought and paid for. Forget strict ideology. If we don’t stop billionaires, will they not leverage treasure to grow more wealth and influence? Duh? From this selfish engine, the survival of the fattest, looms the Hobbesian nightmare of widespread, peasant life as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” That’s precisely opposite “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Global, collective solutions must honor H. G. Wells’ quip that “history is the race between education and catastrophe.” Though a bipolar species fraught with schisms, humanity is capable of understanding how incredibly inter-connected we are, certainly citizens of the same country. If we do not find common ground, then the ground of being on which we depend will dissolve. If not religion or humanism, then crude, mass self-interest must have greater sway and impact on actual, daily actions. History alas provides few examples of the rich and fortunate (especially across the west) finding the compassion to lift hungry and dislocated brethren. Hope no longer springs eternal for those in despair.
Because of overpopulation and resource depletion, time’s not on our side. Whatever happens, the redemptive need is for a “meaning model” (old or new) by which the affluent learn the obvious: they won’t be decimated by allowing the impoverished a fair shake. They may even prosper when more join the realm of consumers. Rationally, there is enough savvy to solve global problems like food sufficiency, even basic housing and drug delivery. Rationality only serves half our brain and, during an era of Trumpism, how long can we wait for the irrational, psychically-unstable half, forever gripping with grievances without context or understanding of how the world functions?
Not knowing the future doesn’t mean we don’t know that the imbalance in human nature must either shift or worst-case scenarios loom. Paradoxically, that our fate is oddly and greatly in our own hands, has not gotten through to those adept at amassing money and power. “We, the people,” evidenced by the massive No Kings protest this weekend, have not yet given up the fight, nor fallen to despair.
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