As people search for ways that humanity can deal with
the many impending ecological and social threats it faces, they try to discern
human capacities that, if enhanced, might see humanity through the future it
faces.
Some, the transhumanists,
argue that humans will have to transform themselves into beings that can
survive the future we have created. They propose essentially a technological
solution. We may, for example, incorporate increasing amounts of computerized
capabilities into our organism, much as we are now developing artificial
hearts. Others of this persuasion focus on DNA manipulation to create humans
that are more suitable to the ecological and social conditions of the future.
Both of these approaches are intellectual in that they
rely on our ability to think our way out of our dilemmas. There is however
another use of our intelligence that seeks solutions without artificially modifying
the human being. One of these is to examine human nature for widely shared characteristics.
Those that are promising for the purpose of human species survival would be
heavily emphasized in educating the young and featured prominently in societal
communications in general. Campaigns of persuasion launched against tobacco
smoking and now obesity are examples of emphasizing inherent human survival
characteristics.
There is a substantial movement that recognized the
human capacity for empathy as a candidate for this kind of social enhancement.
Studies by primatologists and psychologists indicate that our simian ancestors
have this capacity to a limited extent. Primates can “spontaneously” share
goodies, even when paired with strangers. There was an experiment with macaques
in which the monkeys were subject to a mild electrical shock in their cages.
Their reactions elicited agitation in macaques which were in cages some
distance away, but visually and audibly able to witness what was happening.
Whether empathy can be generalized to the extent future calamities will require
is highly debatable although there is a substantial movement to encourage the
practice of empathy. David Brooks, in an article in the New York Times,
expresses his doubts by noting an incident in World War II in which Germans soldiers
were ordered to machine gun Jewish men, women and children. They did so, but
some of them wept while doing so. Brooks argues that this kind of behavior demonstrates
that empathy cannot replace morality. What Brooks fails to mention is that
morality cannot withstand military training. Military training is specifically
designed to break down the common human morality, which can and has interfered
with the soldiers’ ability to kill on command. Having broken the civilian notion of morality down, those emotions are
either replaced by loyalty to military and one’s service unit, or, as in the
case of the American military, it was made more personal by encouraging the “buddy
system” in which soldiers were paired in training and in combat. This had the
added advantage of increasing rage against the enemy if one’s buddy was killed
or injured by the enemy. Even in matters of life and death humans are still
being manipulated by the organizations to which they belong.
My own view remains that humans will have to rely on
their ability to think if they are to survive the future they have created.
However, rather than seeking to transform humans into more survivable forms, I
think we need to seek survivability in the context of the natural world in
which we evolved. To do this, we must acquire the knowledge of how large masses
of people behave when confronted with the kinds of pressures that we can expect
from the natural and social world of the future.
When science sets out to understand an amorphous
collection of entities analogous to the masses of humans envisioned here, it
does so by modeling behavior and then progressively refining that model as
experience dictates, until the model becomes more and more accurate in
predicting outcomes form specific kinds of events. Weather forecasting, for
example, has been developed in this manner.
A model that has suggested itself to me is that of fault
lines in the earth’s surface and the kind of analysis seismologists have
adopted. Suppose we regard the major differences in the human population today
as fault lines in global society. Some of these are race, ethnicity, gender,
wealth, and ancient enmity. Let us take race as an example.
First we should examine existing and recent areas in
society where race has been the source of conflict. As a first step we have to
find a means of distinguishing racism from other motives that may accompany it.
Currently in this country purging of voter lists is taking place under the rubric
of confirming voter qualification. That a substantial portion of those being
purged are black evidences racism. How do we know this? As with any other
natural phenomenon we examine the data and look for correlations or the lack
thereof. In this case the purging is predominantly or totally in the South with
its ongoing racism identified in other areas of human behavior in that area of
the country. Using this evidence we look for a similar pattern of camouflaged
racism in other areas such as employment and housing.
Having identified some of the eruption points on this
fault we examine the conditions which cause this fault to erupt violently.
Gradually we build a social map of the various fault lines, their frequency and
violence of eruptions, intersections with other fault lines and lesser or
tangential fault lines. As the characteristics of a fault line begin to take
shape we get an increasingly clearer picture of the relations that obtain in
the fault line. We look for the kinds of things that have triggered eruptions.
We determine the various costs to society that these eruptions have caused.
Having made these determinations to the point of
functional clarity we set out to find and develop remedies. Can, for example,
an adequate jobs program quell racial tensions that may be heightened to a
dangerous degree by unemployment? Every city and community should know itself
in these objective terms.
As seismology is less than an exact science, so will be
a thinking approach to social unrest. But as weather prediction is more accurate
than seismology in its predictions so we could continue to make our understanding
of social unrest increasingly accurate as we improve it with additional
evidence from its use.
The point of this hypothesis, whether it has merit or
not, is that we must begin to rationalize our understanding of society and
incorporate that understanding into our political and social decisions. The only
way humans have managed to improve their existence is through thought and
understanding and the application of that understanding in our decision making.
If our species is to survive, such understanding will be essential to that
survival. In an essay titled Future
Peace: Breaking Cycles of Violence
Through
Futures Thinking, Tessa Finlev of The Institute for the
Future argues that thinking about the future can itself have a calming effect on
conflicting groups. This article can be found at http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/16-3/A03.pdf.
This effort to think out and plan for a future highly prone to violence, is the
kind of response that I am proposing in this post. Let us employ our reason
before we are so engaged in the immanent resource-based conflicts we are
already seeing as oil reserves diminish that we cannot do the required
planning.
It takes time and great effort to create the
understandings and their best application in a complex and large society. It
is, in my judgment, high time this effort be taken seriously to avoid or
mitigate the violence that will befall us if the trends that threaten our future
continue to coalesce in increasingly perfect storms.
Bob Newhard
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