Who Wants to Save the World?
Which world? And from what shall they save it? By what means?
What control have we, human beings, over the events of tomorrow? Do we have the capacity to change our society, our world, or are we mostly the victims of greater forces, be they natural or supernatural? Can we change the world, or does the world change us? Or both?
Whatever you believe, if you don’t discuss it, you are intellectually vain, because you assume that you know the answer already. Whereas, in all likelihood, you have very little knowledge of the true answers to these questions, if indeed they have true answers at all.
I am going to assume that human beings have the ability to make choices, and, for the sake of discussion, that we are free to sufficient extent to make them. The question of free will versus predestination is merely an exercise in logical argument. No answer is possible. The question itself is moot. We live as though we had free will, and that is all that matters. The subsequent question is more interesting: what shall we choose to do?
Granted, to diverge from my purpose briefly, some of us have more time to consider our options, and thus are decisions are possibly more free, because they are less under the duress of urgency. But all decisions of significance are time sensitive. There significance is always a directly proportional to their urgency. We are beings who exist in time.
I have heard it suggested that time is an illusion. That’s a specious observation. Human nature is an illusion. Consciousness is an illusion. Feelings are an illusion. Values are an illusion. Much of what we take for granted exists only in our imaginations. Can such things be said to exist? Yes. As long as they can be communicated from one person to another. The chaotic, unconscious universe has no interest in human beings, in our experiences or our creations. Only humans care about humanity. The comprehension of time and it’s antecedents, like progress, science, culture and history, are purely human. But it is these things that we value and hope to preserve, and what we seek to save from otherwise inevitable destruction by the ravages of impersonal entropy.
Human beings are life, and life is energy. We are the fire of the sun given form in flesh. We are children of gravity and thermonuclear fusion. We are complexity. We are meaning amidst chaos. Only we can save ourselves from calamity’s enveloping dark.
Few are suited to this task, that is certain. By choice or circumstance, many can only see a very short distance into the future, to their next pay cheque, their next meal, coffee or cigarette. The short sighted abandon responsibility for and control of their own lives past tomorrow, let alone that of their civilization. But I do not judge them. They are the bricks of which society is made. It is up to others to decide where those bricks shall be lain. But I am no elitist. Participation in the shaping of society is there for any who wish it. But they must choose. It is no good to renounce the opportunity and then curse those who take it. If you do not shape your own future, then you have no right to critique others’ efforts. In any case, your critiques are impotent and will be ignored. Words that do not inspire actions are empty and worse than worthless. But who knows what outcome to which even a casual sneer may lead? Probably nothing desirable.
The world changes, inevitably, to some extent by deliberate effort, but mostly by the impersonal result of unconscious collective effort, movement without chosen direction, the result of history’s inertia. Six billion lives act in accordance with short term self-preservation, mostly in the form of instinctive drive and intuitive decisions, which, taken together, lead only to consumption and procreation. The results of individual self-interest are a species’ self-destruction: the opposite effect which our genes intended, if we accept the thesis that genes transcend the individual. The fruits of survival of the fittest are the destruction of all, or so it would appear. Competition has run its course. We can see that now. Cooperation is all that remains. Cooperation or stasis: death by inertia.
So, someone must attempt to steer this behemoth. Someone must lay in a course, set a heading and engage the energies of the non-participants to some more beneficial end.
Those who dream of heaven on Earth are well-meaning, but hopeless. It is not in the nature of human beings to seek or be satisfied with stasis of any kind, heavenly or hellish, but especially happiness and absolute equality for all. We can have a measure of happiness. We can have a foundation of equality. But someone will always want more, others less, and someone will always choose to take what is not, by society’s rule or its intention, his by right. Suffering is our lot, but not perpetual suffering. Death is our destiny, but not the death of all, neither the death of extinction nor that of history’s end through a fantasy of social perfection.
We must accept that our reach will ever exceed our grasp. Still, as our reach lengthens, our grasp does also. We must reach beyond this Earth. It is our only chance. To stay and fester on this eroding planet is not an acceptable long-term option. Colonization of space and other planets is our legacy to the future of mankind. We must accept it. We must admit it. We must take deliberate action to this end. We must abandon our fantasies of heaven on this world or another. Heaven does not exist. There is no hereafter. There is only now and tomorrow. Forget what your ancestors told you. They were ignorant savages, as we shall appear to our descendants. They have misled you, and you have followed their errant guidance out of a combination of sentimentality and naivete. The time has come to grow up. The time has come be take responsibility. The time has come to create our own destiny.