I am an avid fan of history as are many people. But my fascination with it stems largely from a unique and over arching approach.
A groundbreaking and brilliant documentary ostensibly about history, but in actuality more of a treatise on human behavior, came out from the BBC during my teen years. Directed and narrated by Richard Burke and titled "The Day The Universe Changed" is an exploration in a non linear nature of the tenets of behavior in the modern world, and where those ideas and ideals and ethical tenets come from. Even though it came out 40 years ago it is incredibly relevant in the current time and I encourage anyone and everyone to watch it.
It alongside the brilliant documentary series by social anthropologist Desmond Morris, "The Human Animal" informed the foundations of my philosophy and worldview as I became an adult.
Rather than answering all questions, those exposures to history, sociology, anthropology, and ultimately ethics and philosophy encouraged a young man's voracious appetite for knowledge.
It will leave many who know me personally with contradictions, given my equal penchants for anime, video games, sarcasm, and irreverent and dark often oversexualized memes. Then again most people who know me really well already know I'm a complex and unpredictable motherfucker. 🤷♂️
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Anywho......
I strongly feel we are on the cusp of an historical epoch. A new zeitgeist. One that may go unnoticed for it's scale because of the times we live in where change occurs so fast that we humans are basically just along for the ride. We accept "new normals" with unbridled speed never before seen in human history, simply because radical change occurs every generation now. Often times there are multiple changes within a generation. In less than half the life span of my child who hasn't hit thirty yet, we went from zero to billions of smartphones. I'm typing this on a smartphone.
You could scoff and say, if you do know your history, well every time we have a culturally altering event, change happens swiftly. And you'd be correct. But also wrong.
One of the most disruptive storms in all of human history was the invention of the printing press. Its inventor Johannes Gutenberg would go on to......die penniless. Patent law wasn't a thing back then. But within barely more than a generation it disrupted literally everything. The Protestant Reformation, the enlightenment, the Renaissance? These events and periods would not have happened otherwise.
As a technological innovation the printing press really wasn't groundbreaking at all. It was merely the first time existing well established knowledge had been put together in precisely that way. Anyone today with an elementary school level education could re-discover such an invention.
But even knowing the great philosophical contributions of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans before the dark ages, this was the first time in human history that knowledge was democratized on a grand scale.
What pushed us to this wasn't however some grand tradition in knowledge. No, what pushed this was the collapse of the Augustinian worldview. The collapse of the ideology that embraced the concept that NOTHING about the real world mattered except in how it related to God and heaven.
This took the black death, the literal death of more than half of Europe to bring about. And it took a LONG LONG time for ancient knowledge to permeate the aftermath. It is ironically perhaps a permeation that did not occur in the Muslim world, a fact we still cope with the consequences of today
In today's world, with multiple continuous centuries of general progress in the human condition, we see a freight train of change begetting change begetting change, continually gathering steam and on an unpredictable course to who knows where.
We have created and embraced an artificial sort of selective evolution, based on the collective id and ego of our species that far outstrips the timescales of biochemical natural selection. The human population grew six fold in the 20th century on the back of this artificial construct. It also grew the art of warfare to levels of atrocity never witnessed in our species, to where we almost ironically had to adapt to rules of warfare that weirdly put almost random seeming constraints on our penchants for killing one another.
It had painted a maddening picture of how fragile our species derived ethics and cultural moral precepts often crumble in the face of the world we have made. A divisive author in his own right, Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape paints a damning and historical acknowledgement of this reality whilst giving some ideas of how to address it.
It is an easy topic to oversimplify, but I have to admit there was one takeaway from that book that painted this idea into my psyche most vividly. I'll try to drag up the photo, but in the book he places a picture of what seems like some military and non military men and women engaging in a seemingly typical picnic outing. We know enough about facial expressions, and the limitations in how people make those expressions to reliably and accurately perceive happy behaviors in humans from mere photographs. And it is a seemingly happy scene of people posing for a photograph.
When you know the backstory however, that this was a picnic of the adminstrative staff of the Aushwitz Nazi death camp, you begin to be faced with an unfortunate reality when it comes to human behavior. And what is that?
Human beings can become convinced, individually or collectively, to value ideas that go against their own long term self interests and/or against the interests of their fellow humans. Reliably so.
It is this reality, alongside the directions technology push us into, that drives much of the human experience.
Our moral intuitions, based deeply on well understood concepts of social anthropology, simply collapse in situations that do not involve direct interactions.
If your great grandpa regailed you with his Congressional Medal Of Honor story about how he was the one bomb sight engineer to have pressed the right button at the right moment, under heavy enemy fire, to drop the bombs on a munitions factory in The Battle Of Dresden you'd be awestruck to a degree. But you'd have a differenct feeling of great grandpa if he had in loving detailed described another scenario where the same amount of people died, except it was him entering said factory on foot and killing the same number of people with his bayonet on a bloody rampage because his M1 was out of ammo.
Proximity distorts our ethics. And this is a natural aspect of being human. The classic trolley problem in philosophy paints this picture as well, even if I feel it doesn't fully address the deeper issue of what precisely constitutes suffering.
In this classic thought experiment in philosophy you have a trolley running downhill out of control on a track. In the way up ahead you notice five people working on the track. You sit beside a track switch, where if you pull that lever the trolley goes off a side track. Except on that side track is one lone worker who will die if you make that choice. The key is your choice is somewhat indirect to the status of that one guy.
There is a second scenario where instead of being next to a switch you are on an overhead bridge and beside you is an incredibly obese man. Your quick thinking mind is able to calculate that if you simply shove this guy off the bridge into the path of the trolley it will slow the trolley down enough to save those five individuals further on down the track.
Most people when faced with this thought experiment choose pulling the switch as the more ethical choice than deliberately shoving a fat guy to his death, even though the net outcome in human life is the same.
The flaw here is a minor one that doesn't quite take into account the actor and the agency involved with the protaganist in this thought experiment because it fails to address the real elephant in the room, being "what constitutes suffering". Because most people would also agree that perhaps the guy pulling the switch would suffer less in the way of PTSD and regret than the person deliberately shoving another human being to their death for the purpose of that agency.
I won't go into a lengthy rehash of what I've written the last month on the current pandemic, the woes of incredibly polarized national and world politics, or the socioeconomics of a broken capitalist philosophy.
I just want to note as well as implore people to really think long and hard about what they value, and to at least recognize the slippery slopes and grey areas we now face as a species.
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