thank you so much for that operacast! i don't know how you had this post in your inbox but you did and here it is. i got really frustrated when i found out yesterday that all of my posts were gone because of some technical thing over the weekend. i really poured out my heart on some of those posts. thanks again and God bless you, man.
Was glad to do it. I only regret that a much shorter post following yours was also lost and never arrived at my Inbox at all (I'm set up so I can receive alerts when there are new additions to threads where I participate; hence, my luck with yours; not sure why I never got a copy of the smaller follow-up, though [from whom I can't recall; perhaps that poster is reading this and can reproduce it for us].
I can say that I share some of the frustration expressed by others here at the two-steps-forward two-steps-back pattern that human civilization seems trapped in. Sometimes I even wonder if our very species might be in jeopardy.
During the '90s, crises like Bosnia, Rwanda, et al, and the international community's dithering over them, got me profoundly discouraged, probably because I had allowed myself to be sold too much on a general euphoria at the time (in some quarters) that had been generated by the end of the Cold War, of the Soviet Union and of the Berlin Wall, etc. So the Bosn./Rwan. crises et al were too rude an awakening for my fragile psyche to take
. The hope that we might really be looking at a future in which war would really be no longer in nations' interests got me fired up. In my private life, I at first became a happier man, I decided to get married, make a life, stop being caught up in every Presidential election cycle, and so on. I have never regretted getting married, and I do not regret the happy life I have today.
At the same time, the endless addiction, on my part, to staying abreast of continual crises on the evening news gradually started returning by the mid-'90s, and that proved unreasonably upsetting for me.
I couldn't help wondering if our very species might be in jeopardy. Where was the promised consensus that society would finally acknowledge the equal worth of every human being, that we'd only thrive if we all pull together rather than separately? How could we expect nations outside the nuclear club to stay that way if those with the bomb didn't set an example by doing at least some downsizing themselves? Where were the promised freed-up resources to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, etc., now that mega-spending on deterrence for the Cold War no longer seemed necessary? Yes, these and similar principles had already been codified in documents like the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and so on. But it seemed that the end of the Cold War brought us right back to 1946 instead, where international norms were as irrelevant as if the U.N., and similar institutions, had never been established at all.
I thought, "surely there are certain benchmarks that humanity has previously laid down on occasion that have brought sectors of the human family back from the brink of social free fall" - and social free fall, for me, is when a society's left-out grow to such critical mass that anarchy, feuled by resentment, ultimately threatens lives and property on a huge scale, such as happened, for instance, in the French Revolution. (It was this concern that apparently spurred FDR and his advisors to bring on the so-called New Deal in the 1930s, with its concept of the social safety net.)
"Somehow" (I thought) "benchmarks like the principles of Urukagina in Lagash, or those of the Greeks Solon and Pericles, or Buddha's pacifism, or Jesus's serving others, or the "inalienable rights" in the Declaration of Independence, or the Emancipation Proclamation and the Tsar's freeing of the serfs, or the pacifism of Gandhi, or FDR's four freedoms, or the Geneva Conventions, or the U.N. charter, had each apparently had teeth - for their time - in nudging humanity one small step forward and away from a social free fall. But somehow, examples like Rwanda or Bosnia, and the even more distressing shiftlessness of the other nations in responding, seem to call the longlasting effects of the great benchmarks of the past into question. What initially gave these benchmarks their teeth and why do they get so much scorn and ridicule today? Somehow humanity managed to emerge out of the jungle intact via villages, towns, states, etc., each of which tacitly adopt the notion of community, and without which none of us would probably be here today at all. What was there in each of the successive nudges to humanity's sense of responsibility for its fellow creatures that clicked successfully in the past?"
It was at this stage that I rather haphazardly started to dig into whatever common denominator(s) the key ethical/social pioneers of the past might have. I was looking for some pattern, yes, but I truly had no notion as to what that pattern might be.
I did, though, start out with one basic premise: Evolution is most certainly intrinsic to the development of each and every species - Darwin & Wallace have that dead right - and each and every species has basic needs that are either met in the course of evolution or are not met at all, resulting in extinction. Humanity's evolution has seemed to thrive in social patterns, and if those patterns snap apart through galloping selfishness and neglect, cultures perish. Unfortunately, today, even though we still can point to a few individual cultures here and there, there is one overarching global culture that is more ubiquitous today than any similar would-be global culture has ever been before. The reason why that's terrifying is because that means that if the global culture of today implodes, the resulting cataclysm would be more catastrophic than any cultural implosion in the past. Add the apparent disintegration of the ecology to that mix and you really have the makings for human extinction.
Maybe it's too big of a leap to (and others would have to judge this) assume that whatever ingredients go into humanity's incremental nudges toward greater caring and social evolution must be as real as any other ingredient in evolution. But I make that assumption. Procreation is symbiotically tied to the drive for sex, nourishment is symbiotically tied to the drive for food, sufficient energy is symbiotically tied to the drive for sleep. In each case, something eminently practical is tied symbiotically to a specific desire for something comforting, whether good sex, good food or a decent night's sleep.
I happen to view the eminent practicality of a sensitized responsibility/conscience toward all of society's members in the same light, frankly. I view it in the same way as I do procreation, nourishment and sufficient energy. Now, if the comfort element in procreation is delightful sex, what is the comfort element in caring for all our fellow creatures? That's the question I'd like answered.
Going by the historical record, the key evolutionary nudges toward wider caring throughout history SEEM tied to countercultural theism? But maybe that's a red herring. Can any of the readers here detect any other "comfort" thread that also runs through the history of pioneering altruists, or is countercultural theism the only one? Please? If you can confirm some consistent thread here, it should be bottled, because I honestly believe that we are staring down the barrel of imminent human extinction today!
I can just hear the cynics on Web forums everywhere saying "All that is nonsense: treatment of the less well off can't influence the future of humanity one little bit; we're all still here; so stop being a pain", and bla bla bla bla bla. Well, I don't choose to complacently accept the extinction of humanity because of stubborn stupidity, arrogance, shortsightedness, stunted attention span, selfishness, greed and violence.
Cheers (.......er.........I guess.......),
Operacast
