A thought arising from a discussion I ducked out of last night: Do you feel that the human race has changed materially (that is, to a significant degree) between, say, the days of Sumer or Egypt and the present moment? I dont. I think weve learned a bunch of tricks, and we may be a little taller, a little longer-lived, trivia like that, but I think the mindsets we established back then have basically not changed that much. Moreover, I think its going to be several thousand years before they do, assuming we survive that long. And I dont think thats necessarily a good or a bad thing. If its true, its just a thing. Which is why I believe that the course were on, of trying to progress (in all directions or none) faster and faster, do more, master more information, embrace ever more change, is a dangerous blind alley. There are those who believe that we are capable of forcing the pace of our evolution by this acceleration, but from the evidence I see around me all were doing is stressing ourselves to destruction and impeding any natural development that might possibly be trying to come through. (I could be wrong; Mindfulness might be just around the corner, but were blocking it because we think what we need to do is know everything without our heads exploding and make better machines so we dont have to work so hard.) The difference--one of the differences--between us and any other creature on the face of the earth is that we are the only ones who think we know better than the set of forces we call nature. Were starting to learn (hopefully not too late) that, in the sphere of ecology, we really dont; but when it comes to our own development, we still have that lesson to face. We keep dragging at evolution, saying faster, faster, no *this* way you stupid force of nature, and evolution carries on, unaffected, doing what it has always done and always will. Its not making us smarter just because we try to overload ourselves with information, or increasing our capacity to withstand the tortures we choose to inflict upon ourselves, nor will it. And it wont do anything inside a human lifetime, however much we may want it to. The next stage in human evolution is waaay off in the future, and we wont reach it any faster no matter how hard we push. Like it or not, when (if!) we make it to space we will still be the same people we are now, still the same people who built Disneyland and Auschwitz and Chartres Cathedral, still the same people who wrote the Missa Solemnis and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still the same people who try to cure cancer while reducing cities full of us to radioactive rubble. Were going to be those people for many lifetimes to come. So in the name of all the gods we know, let us stop trying to be different people and start trying to be us better.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 09:24:45 +0000
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