Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Above us only sky
'Humanism,' wrote H. J. Blackham, 'proceeds from an assumption that man is on his own and this life is all and an assumption of responsibility for one's own life and for the life of mankind - an appraisal and an undertaking, two personal decisions. Less than this is never humanism.'
Coming from the first director of the British Humanist Association, and author of Humanism, the Pelican Original (1968) from which the above is taken, this seems authoritative enough. Challenging enough, too, when you think about its implications - which, of course, Blackham spent the rest of his fine book doing.
One that he missed is hidden in the phrase 'the life of mankind'. When we read that today, of course, we immediately politically correct it to 'the life of humanity', but we probably have much the same vague mental image as Blackham may have had in 1968, something like a blur of National Geographic pages flicking past, maybe the UN flag, the Earth from space, babies in Africa, suits in Manhattan, lab coats and microscopes ...
Whatever it is, it's wrong. Because 'the life of humanity' surely includes future humanity, and future humanity is much, much bigger than we think. Even if we never go out into space on any large scale, and merely send out machines to beam us solar energy, ward off asteroid impacts, and explore, and the human population stabilises at ten billion or so (or whatever anyone, Greens apart, considers a stable population) we're still talking about vast numbers of human lives over the next thousand years, or ten thousand, or hundred thousand, or million years ... and why stop there? Some species have survived almost unchanged for tens of millions of years. There's no reason in principle why we shouldn't be among them - or, if we aren't, having some cultural continuity with our successors. Nor is there any reason, in principle, for our civilization to collapse.
Taking responsibility for that is a big, scary deal. We're living in the very early days of human civilization. And that's just the start. If we relax the constraint of most of us staying on Earth, to imagine the future of humanity we have to go out on a clear night and look up.
Now try taking your proportionate particle of responsibility for that.
8 Comments:
"There's no reason in principle why we shouldn't be among them - or, if we aren't, having some cultural continuity with our successors. Nor is there any reason, in principle, for our civilization to collapse.
Taking responsibility for that is a big, scary deal."
A citizen is someone who has the courage to make the survival of the human species his personal responsibility, as I seem to remember someone saying in a very, very bad film.
'Starship Troopers'? I've always thought that film was an inspiring vision of the communist future of humanity, in which nobody uses money, we have been so long at peace we have forgotten everything about war apart from the skirmish line and the snazzy uniforms, and there are mixed sex showers.
So you're telling us to "live like you're in the early days of a better civilization"? I'll drink to that!
"He [Rabbi Tarfon] would also say: It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it."
---"Ethics of the Fathers" ("Pirkei Avos"), a short book of the Talmud traditionally included with prayer-books.
Or: To a sufficiently local approximation, everything is local, spatially and temporally both.
STARSHIP TROOPERS is kind of a dog's breakfast, ideologically. I used to idly imagine a world in which STARSHIP TROOPERS was taken as the equivilent of the works of Karl Marx.
The evolution of "Heinleinism" would provide for some interesting situations; what do you do with those federal volunteers if no external enemies exist? Labor armies, of course! Thus; left-Heinleinism!
The Old Man would be proud - forward the banners of Trotskyite-Heinleinism! (Alert the NKVD!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_army
I would add, not merely survival, but survival with some form of what might be called style. That is, future civilisation(s) that include at least the opportunity for each human being to live a life of dignity and achieve their potential.
Mind you, I would probably settle for reaching that remote condition within my lifetime, and then hope it continued into the indefinite future.
By
Anonymous, at
Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:45:00 pm