CAN HUMANITY STILL IMPROVE ITS WAYS?

Homo egoisticus – 4.000.000 B.D.


Many, many years from now, those who will be our descendants might look back at us the way we look at the Neanderthals. They will recognize our advancements and capabilities but they will also see the flaws which after many eons the successors of human kind will have overcome.

Is this a likely scenario? We will never know, of course. But we can speculate.

In essence human kind as it is today is capable of almost everything that it wasn’t made for. This is the beauty and it is our potential tragedy.

It is first of all a recognition of everything that Darwin told us. The clockmaker who brought us to life, was blind and he will always be. Mutations which some 200.000 years ago enabled us to become more skilled hunters, also led us to send a man to the Moon. It is accidental. No intelligent being with a sound mind would ever have concocted the modern human being and let it loose on the planet Earth on purpose to do its work, unbalanced and unfinished as we are.

For instance, why would an intelligent designer think of a life form which is actually a regression from the norm that prevails in the rest of the animal kingdom, which is the natural inclination to preserve life’s balance? Every animal – every predatory animal especially – knows this by instinct. So why not the humans?

Why do humans not have an absolute resistance – and I mean: absolute – against killing off its own kind? One could say, of course: but this is the prerogative of the dominant animal in every other species too. Lions kill the offspring of competitors. Baboons do it too. If you want to have strong genes, needed to maintain the versatility of the species, well, in fact humans are much too kind. So here perhaps is a point in favor too, and not necessarily against ‘us’.

Third: why would an intelligent designer create so much variety, even within a narrow band of genes, in terms of intellect, quality and level of talents, reason, emotion, etcetera? The first answer could be: it isn’t a failure of design, it is a failure of behavior. Humans have cancelled the mechanism of selection on those qualities themselves! They go for stupid things like looks and form. Stupid men prefer stupid blondes. But then, this is the very failure of our design, or it is the handicap that proves the fact that actually there was no designer at all.

I am going for the latter, as people may well understand from my earlier postings in this blog. It is out of pure curiosity, out of my private speculative interest in the future of mankind that I raise this issue. The first issue, of course, is whether in actual fact man is such an imperfect animal in the first place, and whether my alleged weaknesses are not, by further analysis, the inevitable corollaries of our uniqueness – or to put in another way: our very perfection.

We should not get ourselves blindfolded by our own humanity in judging who we are. This is the conundrum. The very qualities which the blind watchmaker, accidentally, ignited in us – indeed: our humanity, our intelligence, our intellect, our variety and so on - in the end both help us to survive and they challenge us, constantly, in our very sustainability. We are destructive and we are kind. One is very necessary to foster the other. Our intellect, which provides us with new ideas, inventions, solutions etcetera, is at the same time our greatest threat. But of course. How can it be otherwise?


We can't just do away with the money wolves, or should we?

Still, the question remains: can we improve? Can we consciously foster the benefits of our qualities and downplay our weaknesses, not just in an individual, but at larger scale, for a longer period, to benefit us all? The dilemma may be whether we can enhance humanity’s beauty – in its widest sense – and relinquish our selfishness at the same time.


Selfless love to the extreme

I am coming back to my first thesis: we are capable of things for which we haven’t been ‘made’. This in fact is a potential of which we haven’t yet seen the absolute limits. We can not say today: this is as far humanity gets; over to some other species. We will never say it.


Is it possible that one day she will walk the Earth?

We can’t look into a million years future. So many things along the way can happen, out of ourselves or just by nature, including out of space. But we do have the capability to critically asses our potential as a species. This is what makes us unique anyway. So why not look at ourselves more critically, in the context that we can reasonably foresee. We can do this in an ambitious way. We can make a treaty to save our planet, as I have been promoting in this blog. But we can also create an agreement, among all human beings, about ourselves. Why wait for another Mozes to lay down some new commandments if we are intelligent enough to make them for ourselves and agree to nourish our strengths and reduce the impact of our imperfection?