Humanity's Journey

"Very good, Captain. There is hope for you. Perhaps in several thousand years, your people and mine shall meet to reach an agreement. You are still half savage, but there is hope. We will contact you when we are ready."

Star Trek, "Arena"

This sort of line was spoken in more than one Star Trek episode. The Enterprise encounters some powerful and super-evolved race who initially judge humans to be relative savages, but Kirk does something that shows that humans have some evolved attributes as well. The conversation ends with the aliens (rather condescendingly, in my view) letting Kirk know that while humans are not advanced enough for them to deal with, maybe in a few thousand years we will have evolved enough for them to deal with us. (Of course, truly advanced aliens would have simply ignored Kirk and his adversary rather than set up a single combat situation, but then there'd be no show.)

The storyline is on the silly side, but it does bring up a question that's worth considering: where will we be in a thousand years? The pessimist can point to a host of societal ills and say that we haven't made a great deal of progress. The optimist can point to the relative worldwide peace of the past sixty years, and (in the U.S.) the substantial progress made in terms of societal treatment of women, blacks, gays, and other disadvantaged groups.

As for me, in general I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist. (Easy for me, though; I'm a white male born into a non-dysfunctional middle-class family, and have faced few real challenges in my life.) But I do think there's cause for optimism. Of course, we still have many problems that won't go away anytime soon, but I find it difficult to look at too many aspects of the world situation and find things that aren't better than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Of course I don't mean material things, but rather bigotry, social consciousness, concern for the environment, and so on.

One thing that sadly has changed little is the fact that following one's self-interest is still the dominant social paradigm. Examples of this abound, and I'll probably be writing about them in the future, but the one that leaps to mind now is the drug problem. Everyone knows that Prohibition failed in the U.S. because too many Americans refused to give up drinking, and the money from alcohol sales went to organized crime. The repeal of Prohibition was a protective action, an attempt to slow down the mob's flow of money before they truly took over; America's freedom and democracy were in serious danger.

Five decades later, American consumption of cocaine reached levels at which many millions of dollars a year were being collected by the Colombian drug lords, and the situation in Colombia became desperate. Judges who sentenced drug cartel leaders were assassinated with regularity, the rule of law was seriously undermined, many police and others in law enforcement were on the mob's payroll. The cartel leaders ended up with enough resources to essentially build their own army, and a section of the country came under the de facto rule of the cartel. Did we end the prohibition of cocaine? No, because it wasn't our country that was being taken apart. Granted, cocaine is much more dangerous than alcohol, but I'm very sure that if our country was in such dire straits, it would have been seriously considered. Legalizing cocaine would cause relatively minor social problems in the U.S., and relieve huge ones in Colombia. But it isn't going to happen. Not in our self-interest.

A large part of this has to do with issues of nationalism, from which I believe no country is immune. To Americans, an American life is much more important than a Colombian one. Parity in this regard would be a huge step forward, but even I'm not optimistic that this will happen in the next few hundred years.

I tend to compare the history of humanity to the history of one person. We have childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and so on. Stages of life. We can also say that there are stages of civilization. Perhaps we could say that infancy ended with the emergence of homo sapiens, humans more or less as we are today. To have even reached that point, we had to fight our way up through evolution. Aggression and selfishness was rewarded; if you were passive or let the other guy eat first, you probably didn't live long enough for your genes to be passed on. But since civilization began, we've been (or should be) fighting the qualities that allowed us to survive in the first place. We haven't truly needed aggression and selfishness to survive for thousands of years, but we're stuck with them, at least for now. Will those genes slowly die out (now that passive and peaceful ones can also be passed on), allowing us to have something approaching a utopian society in a millennium, or two, or a dozen? I have no desire to live that long, even if I could, but I would be very interested to know.