This. This is a picture. pic.twitter.com/TaUrKyjFiY
— Gideon Turk (@GideonTurk) January 31, 2017
How strong is your faith in humanity?
More accurately: do you believe the nature of people to be a constant? As a genus, how much have we matured in the last 100 years? The past 1,000? The past 5,000?
2,500 years after his death, we still refer to Alexander as “The Great.” However if his conquest of the world had begun in 1935 instead of 334 BC, would we still ascribe praise to his quest for glory? Would we honor Julius Caesar in metered verse if his bloody military campaigns happened two generations ago, instead of two millennia?
The past two centuries has seen an escalation in technology but not a corresponding and equivalent escalation of morality..
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For the most part, the celebrated conquerers of antiquity are deified; we laud their strategic brilliance and absolve their brutality. Morality is cast aside; history is sanitized and impersonal. Because we are not forced to bear witness to the countless myriads of families destroyed, whole populations exterminated, entire generations pillaged, raped, and enslaved, we comfortably consign them to oblivion.
Many heroes of yore would be considered genocidal maniacs today. So I ask again: as a species, has (and should) our goodness improve(d) over the ages?
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I’m on record as saying goodness as it relates to humans can only be measured on the sliding scale of time. Clemency is granted our ancestors largely because of two factors: they lacked our interconnectedness and our technology. It is only in the past 200 years that much of what now binds us as a civilization has come into existence. 100 years ago there was no such thing as standardized time; you met at dawn, dusk, or high noon not because it sounded dramatic; there simply was no way to agree on an exact time of day. Before the advent of railroads, the furthest distance a person could cover (on land) on a given day was determined by the stamina of the horse they rode; now we traverse oceans with ease. Before the discovery of the microbe, rampant disease decimated whole continents; today vaccinations and clean water have paved the way for massive population growth. Before electric power generation and distribution, sunlight dictated what hours we could work our magic or mischief; now we are empowered to spread goodwill or chaos at any time of day or night. Whereas once we scrawled on cave walls with coal and carved cuneiform into wet clay, today we transmit and receive ideas across the globe at the speed of thought, having lifted all of the barriers of physical distance on communication.
All of these things bound us together in ways we could not have predicted. We shot men into space in tin cans, who looked down at us from the heavens, dissolving the illusion of separateness: for better or worse, are fates are combined. We all inhabit the same fragile blue sphere; stuck together on a ball of iron hurtling through space at 66,000 mph, circling an exploding ball of hydrogen, protected from the cold nothingness of space by a layer of atmosphere so thin, if it had a highway, you could get in a Chevy and drive to the edge in less time than it takes to ride the subway from Yankee Stadium to Coney Island.
Human beings have suffered (or enjoyed, depending on your perspective) 10,000 years of everyone having to fend for themselves; every tribe for themselves, every city-state, every nation, looking out for their own best interests. An entire human history operating on the comforts of illusory separateness and the innate freedom of responsibility to each other it bestowed, and in three short generations we have been forced to come to terms with the intrinsic beauty of our oneness, and its inherent liabilities.
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Scientific advancement has unquestionably improved the (potential) quality of life for all humans. As responsibility is the ballast to privilege, so do these benefits come laden with irrevocable consequence. The past two centuries has seen an escalation in technology but not a corresponding and equivalent escalation of morality. We enjoy comforts none before us could have imagined, and face dangers no previous age could have borne.
Prior to us, catastrophes were local, and so, relatively contained. Geography restricted infectious disease, as small pox couldn’t simply board a plane and infect an indigenous populace. Industry lacked the collective ability to raise the global temperature and melt the polar ice caps.
Prior to us, any one of nine world leaders didn’t have the ability to push a button and eradicate the entire human race in a matter of minutes.
As Albert Einstein once famously noted: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
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If you believe the nature of humanity to be a constant, ask yourself: if Alexander had been given the terrifying power of thermonuclear weapons, would humanity have survived to see Julius Caesar? Could any statesman of eld–Hannibal, Charlemagne, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Bismarck, Churchill, Lenin—been trusted with the awesome power of destruction at the fingertips of current leaders?
Are the individuals now charged with the continuation of life on earth as we know it–ethically superior to all that have come before?
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If the values you (claim to) embrace feel outdated by modernity, the world can feel like a scary place. The comforts of nostalgia can be admittedly seductive if you’ve enjoyed the luxury of not being encumbered by the plights of the less fortunate. So sobering are the challenges we face today, all of our minor differences are worth setting aside. Our survival is now inextricably interwoven; quibbles about race, gender, religion, and sexual preference are worth overcoming when weighed in the balance with our continued existence.
As Albert Einstein once famously noted: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Upgrading the quality of your goodness with less frequency than the operating system on your iPhone is an indulgence the human race can ill afford. Obviously, terms and conditions apply, most notably: any of our rights are all of our rights. This is the price we pay for subsequent generations to be able to look back upon us eons in the future, and strive to exceed the moral excellence of their ancestors.
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Photo: embed from Twitter, Chicago tribune