They say there is nothing new under the sun, but is that really true? Human kind seems a new thing, with a written history of just 10,000 years or so in a cosmos some 13,700,000,000 years old. Even if there are other intelligent civilizations in the cosmos, or the galaxy, humanity is certainly a new thing in this neighborhood. (I like to think there are others but, so far, the evidence for them is pretty thin.) Each person is a new thing as well, a unique collection of genes, an improbable entity in history, whose life will be an individual sojourn unlike any other.
Though we are prone to seeing ourselves as something central in the cosmos, the focus of attention, the apple in god's eye; that isn't anywhere near being true. In cosmic terms our family climbed down from the trees early in the week, transitioning from climbing to walking. We learned to talk just a few days ago. It was only yesterday that we started to write down our thoughts and the industrial revolution started a few hours ago. Within the last few minutes we have been astonished to discover some of the basics of the history of the universe and ourselves. We have just now discovered that we are a species of ape recently climbed down from the trees.
Most of us seem a bit stunned and more than a bit disappointed at this revelation. Instead of admitting to the now obvious, we cling to the fantasy of being important, of being central to creation, of having power. We cling to god beliefs that teach we were created just as we are about the same time as the stars started to shine. Some of us imagine that we actually talk with a god, and that he/she/it/them talk back – giving instructions on, say, running for the office of President of the US or qualifying some people’s love as acceptable while others as sin. Most of us seem to imagine that the earth belongs to our generation to be stripped bare if necessary, exploited without regard to possible consequences. We act as if there is a guarantee that our species can’t possibly become extinct, in spite of knowing that 99.99% of all the species that have ever existed on this little planet are.
Manifest childishness. The universe has evolved in a way that bits of star stuff have become self-aware and intelligent. This is a wondrous thing! There is no telling where that intelligence can lead, what it can evolve into, where it can go. But it will not go far if we continue to cling to the illusions of our early childhood.
We really should admit to how new we are at this. We are so new that we are still trying to figure out how to govern ourselves with any semblance of justice and compassion while protecting the individual liberty that most of us crave. Clearly we are not doing a very good job, though we are not doing as bad as it might seem at first. There is a growing realization of the uniqueness of each individual, and the need to protect the minority from the prejudices of the majority. The short hand label for this realization, at least here in the West, is "Civil Rights." The US started with the civil rights of Land Owning White Guys, then expanded to Non Land Owning White Guys, Non-White Guys, Woman, Children, and is starting to include people who are not just heterosexuals. We haven't gotten it perfect, but we are doing a much better job than we were 50, 100, or 500 years ago. Integral with that governing is designing and preserving an economic system that fairly rewards work and innovation while establishing and preserving the social fabric that makes us who we are. Once again there is far to go before we figure it out; with millions of individuals suffering while we work on it.
We are terrible at balancing power against power, and though 6+ billion of us crowd this little world, we do much better in small groups than we do in big ones. But we are new at this as well. Up until a few hundred years ago we didn't even know how big the earth was, or that there were other people living in those parts. The vast majority of us are still only vaguely aware of the parts of the earth outside of our local 20 miles or so, and even more vague about the people who live there. We imagine all kinds of things about them, things that make them different. Most of our imaginings are far from true, but then again, empathy is something we are new at as well.
In all of our efforts there are at least two bits of wisdom lacking. The first is admitting that we are just now discovering how much we have left to learn. We should be astonished at what we have learned and absolutely mesmerized by what we have not. Clearly a large part of our cooperative efforts should be in learning as much as we can as quickly as we can. We have a hint of how much there is we don’t know yet, we need to get after it.
And we have to remember that we are children still, prone to acting as such. We frighten easily. We can't see the consequences of our actions and we are terrible at looking very far into the future. We have a tendency to be utterly self-centered, and we often do things that can and do get us hurt. A sizable percentage of us are bullies.
Maybe we are reaching a turning point in history. We are just beginning to understand that the universe is nothing less than an engine of constant creativity, endlessly evolving, of which we are an integral (though not central) part. In spite of what we have learned, what we do know, most of us haven’t grasped our true place in the universe and cling to an archaic view. As mentioned we cling to religions that teach a fixed creation where we were made as we are, the same as we have always been and basically unchanging until some fixed point in a fixed future. Our political leaders are just as bad. We vote for people who claim they already know all the answers or worse, vote for those who claim the answers of the past were the right ones. They cling to nation-states, borders, war and exclusionary policies as if the mistakes of the past will be the good ideas of the future. They act as if limited oil reserves will always be the real source of energy, as if technology isn't changing the way we know our world and interact with each other.
Up until now we have been involved in the continuous creativity and evolution in spite of ourselves. We didn't know, but it didn't matter that we didn't know. Now I think it matters. Those in power have enough power at their command to kill most of us off. They can destroy our civilization and maybe even drive the species to extinction. Recent history has given us every reason to believe that some political, and certainly some religious leaders, would rather destroy human kind than see continuing creativity mark them as irrelevant. Their clinging to the old way of seeing our place in the cosmos is putting all of our futures at risk.
There are only two options. Political and religious leaders can figure it out for themselves, changing policy and re-interpreting ideologies to reflect this new understanding. They can ride the wave and be part of the rapidly accelerating creativity. Or most of the rest of us figure it out in spite of them and shove them out of power. Should it go that way those doing the shoving can be nothing but the most dire of enemies to those in power. I think some of what we have seen around the world these past months is a first wave of this growing realization.
So how far off the reservation am I? I think all of our political and economic systems are doomed to fail. Not because they are necessarily bad systems, but because they are still just prototypes, first efforts, systems created while we were basically deaf, dumb and blind. Those who rule cling to the old idea because therein lies their claim on being rulers. In doing so they abandon creativity and thus betray the very nature of human kind in the cosmos.
How far off the reservation am I? I think the future lies in reorienting ourselves, recognizing that it isn’t the systems that work or don’t, it is the people, the engines of creation in those systems. No matter how good the system, if the people are corrupt the system can’t survive. Likewise, there are no really bad systems if the people involved are looking to the good of the many and striving for a better future of the whole. Dictatorships and kingdoms need not, necessarily, fail; it is dictators and kings who fail the societies they control. Democracy is not necessarily good, not if the democracy is corrupted by power and greed, where the only choice given for an election are those already bought and sold. Nor is democracy immune to a kind of collective failure. Hitler's National Socialist Party won 230 seats in the Reichstag in a free election. The result was political chaos and deadlock, (Sound familiar?) and the eventual rise of the Third Reich. (You should look it up; it is a fascinating and - sadly - contemporary story of duplicity, dishonesty, political corruption, violence and fear mongering.)
Socialism can work to a remarkable degree. The old U.S.S.R. was a Superpower for decades, and fell more due to greed, corruption and military adventurism than to anything having to do with its economic system. Capitalism can fail, all that need happen is that greed becomes the only driving factor with all other social needs abandoned or ignored.
We, creative bits in an ever creative cosmos, make the difference, no gods, no guarantees, nothing fixed. But we can't stop creating new politics, new economies, new ways. We can't stop creating for, the moment we do, we have no place in an endlessly creative universe.
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