Can I ask you two simple questions? They won’t take up too much of your time, although I would like you to think about the answers carefully, possibly overnight: just let the questions float about for a bit and your most honest answers will eventually pop into your head.
That said, it would be very interesting indeed to compare the answers you give straight away to the answers you give yourself time to mull over.
Here are the questions:
1) What Is Humanity’s Greatest Success?
2) What is Humanity’s Greatest Failure?
Simple, aren’t they? Or not, as the case may be. Having had a few years to think about the answers in a roundabout way, writing lots of essays and articles as well as a big book about all sorts of important things, mine came pretty quickly, and I haven’t changed my mind in the month or so since I first asked myself.
1) What Is Humanity’s Greatest Success?
The ability to rationalise.
(Reasoning: It allows us to take information and use it in a practical way, including being able to make conscious decisions. It is the basis upon which all moral judgements are made. Rationalisation is the thing that allows us to plan for the future and learn from the past.)
2) What Is Humanity’s Greatest Failure?
Civilization.
(Reasoning: It is the physical state by which humans cut themselves off from anything non-human through the construction of towns and cities, which require the net import of resources — the key to the disconnection from the source of these resources, and their fate. Civilization creates a situation where the acquisition of power and material goods becomes a fundamental human characteristic, being a self-perpetuating and hence a destructive condition.)
No doubt you have your own answers, and I would love you to share them – or even comment about mine. Just don’t forget to think carefully before you answer…
Perhaps we not discussing real issues, but rather tip-toeing around them.
From a historical perspective, it appears that humankind is the only organism on Earth that produces food, amasses more food than is needed for survival and made food into a commodity. Farmers have not been primarily motivate by an altruistic desire to grow food because they have wanted to feed a growing population, nor have they been selling food to increase human population numbers. The more food farmers grew, the more wealth they accumulated. Our (agri-)culture has evidently devised a spectacularly successful economic system that continuously expands the food supply for human human beings worldwide. What I am trying to suggest is simply this: An economic system that requires ever increasing food production, supposedly to feed a rapidly growing human population, appears to be inadvertently and unexpectedly enlarging the size of the human population on Earth.
That is to say, the predominant culture and its global economy appears to produce many wonders as well as potentially deleterious impacts. Would you agree that if our culture chooses to keep growing the global economy as we are doing now, then we will likely keep getting what we are getting now… for better and worse?
For a long time, the leaders of the predominant culture have chosen to continuously expand production capabilities, ones that give rise to the rampant economic globalization we see today. Unfortunately, an ever expanding, leviathan-like global economy appears to give rise to something recognizably unsatisfactory because it could become unsustainable.
If you will, please consider how the relentless hoarding of wealth and the conspicuous over-consumption of resources by millions of people leave billions of people in the family of humanity hungry.
For fortunate millions of people with riches to recklessly consume limited resources, while billions of less forunate people go without adequate food to eat, seems somehow not quite right.
Inequity is sad enough; grotesque inequity will one day be considered intolerable, I suppose.
If leaders of our predominant culture choose to modify the way the unbridled global economy continuously grows and the way it inequitably distributes resources, then perhaps they and we will find more reasonable, sensible, fair and, equally important, sustainable ways of performing these practices better.
Perhaps it is a mistake for me to do so; but, nevertheless, I am assuming most of us can agree that the unbridled expansion of the global economy, given its huge scale and rapid growth, will result in this manmade economic colossus eventually reaching a point in human history when it becomes patently unsustainable in a finite world with make-up and size of Earth.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001