What activities and behaviours that we engage in today will be looked upon as primitive in one or two-thousand years’ time? When we look back such lengths of time our ancestors are so far from us in their understanding of the world and their conduct as to appear profoundly limited in many ways – the brain as an organ for cooling the blood, sacrificial offerings to all manner of gods, etc.
Clearly something which future generations will analyse for decades will be our global response to climate change. Regardless of root and auxiliary causes, it’s clear that left unaddressed we will cause worldwide destruction leading to the collapse of populations of all species. We’re already seeing the results of our impact on the planet.
In a similar vein, the use of vehicles which spew toxic fumes into the very air around us as a primary transport method. Clear links to neurological disorders are forming – a dim light illuminates a corner of the library, growing brighter every day, as if fed by the rise in pollutants on the roads outside our homes.
I could go on.
But what then will be the rationalisation that our future generations offer for our aberrant behaviour? Unlike the industrialists of the 1800s ignorance won’t be a factor – we’re all aware of these problems, and their broad impact.
I suggest that the primary reason we’re incapable of addressing these existential problems today is the very software within our heads. The consciousness (and unconsciousness) entrusted with directed our every action. If there is a central myth that pervades the modern West (and well-beyond I suspect), it’s the sacred I.
We are told, and believe, that the rights of the individual are inviolable. That we all have the right to be in control of our own destinies, that self-indulgence is fine, that self-improvement is great, and ultimately that self-direction is the fundamental building block of a modern society.
But I suggest that this wasn’t always the case.
I believe that we have transitioned:
- Our very earliest ancestors likely lived in strict social hierarchy within small groups – similar to all the great apes. Working together for the continuation of the group, at the mercy of the alpha. This is likely to have been the case for all types of early community – whether hunter-gather, or the earliest cave dwelling settlers.
- Some time after, as we began to increase the sizes of our communities – likely after the domestication of plants and animals around 10,000 B.C. – I posit that we continued our direction within a social hierarchy, strongly directed by leaders without individual dialogue – no “Alpha says do this, but I don’t want to” just simple adherence. All in accordance with sustaining the group.
- Then comes the breakdown of bicamerality – when the I comes into play. Here began our concept of the self, and the introspection that would follow. Plenty broke from the most strict structures of society, but in place of knee-jerk adherence came the first modern religions such as Christianity. At which point, needs of the group are placed ahead of your own, and self-direction is something to be punished. Even those not following the religions continued to live in close communities.
- This continues until the late 1700s. The majority of people live in small communities, plenty are nomadic, but communities nonetheless, but the point is that in the vast majority of cases, people lived in close quarters with their tribespeople. Intermingling of groups was common, but with a lack of centralised control – migration was a souk, not a supermarket.
- As the age of steam pulled into the station, people were organised into components of a machine. Community was still key (thanks to the dominance of those religions we saw before – a regular tick-tock of the weekly rites), and living quarters were, although divided by family, still coalescing around group structures. This period saw the breakdown of the static man. With more “opportunity” and a shift from simple fealty to one’s god being a noble life, soothsayers began to chant about the exciting rights of the individual. People uprooted more commonly, control over groups was shifting from the pulpit and throne, to industrialists.
- At the turn of the 1900s the mythic Nation State was so believed as to be reality. Wars unfolded at the behest of men who demanded as much control as they might squeeze from the planet. As the 50s rolled around people began to wonder about the truth of the oldest religious orders, and the faith they might otherwise place in those going by names such as statesman. Here we see the further erosion of community. If we can massacre generation after generation with no improvement to the individual, what was the point of it all?
- And we arrive at today. Apart from one another in almost every way. Turning to simulated community at every opportunity. Inventing all manner of “mental disorders” to cope with the nastiness of driving this conscious mass through a culture so distinct from that for which it was evolved.
These summaries are sloppy, so thanks for sticking with it. My conclusion is that we’re living through huge changes in the very thing we call consciousness, how we come to terms with existing in a universe that hasn’t even noticed us, and the invention of strange concepts such as truth and self.
And this volatility outlined above, married with nature’s clever trick of a conscious mind, likely obscures from view models of conception and collaboration that would allow us to truly address the most serious of threats we face today.