-15- Unification: Humanity's Progress and Future
As we have come to expand our social nets, what do we see when we look back at what connects us? What can we predict when we look forward into the future?
Our history can be characterized by a series of constantly splintering narratives. On a genetic level, we are all virtually the same creatures, and have been for hundreds of thousands of years, but our social and cultural norms would paint a completely separate picture, often placing us chasms apart from one another. The complexity is difficult to comprehend, as we each live amidst unique tapestries of cultural values and beliefs, shaped by geography and resources, and seasoned by the power of storytelling. As travelling bands of nomads, and as settlers of far away lands, think of the alien worlds that the earliest human explorers were left to contend with. Imagining this, we do not need to solely speculate on all of the different ways life could evolve on different planets. We can observe some version of this phenomena right here on this one.
To illustrate this, I would like to borrow an example from Tamim Ansary's masterwork book, The Invention of Yesterday, where he describes the evolution of the ancient river valley civilizations, each arising from around 1500-3500 BCE. To say that these early people adopted distinct lifestyles from one another would be an understatement, because it would trivialize the impacts they felt from their environments alone. The Egyptians, for example, were one of these cultures, settling along the temperate Nile River, and flanked by the natural defensive posture of the Sahara desert. They were insulated, secure, and contained all of the resources they needed to develop massive projects that still stand tall to this day.
Then there were the three other civilizations that co-existed at the time alongside three other major river networks across the globe. They were the Mesopotamians along the Tigris and Euphrates, the Harappans along the Indus, and the Chinese along the Huang He (yellow river). Just like the Egyptians, these rivers and these lands meant that the people of these settlements were forced into vastly different ways of living. Their environments, after all, demanded they be different. Rather than pyramids, the Mesopotamians built walls around their villages to fend off incoming raiders from up and down the river coast. The early Chinese settlers were forced to construct dykes to prevent river overflows from overwhelming their towns and destroying their fields. The Harappans, in their aquatic abundance, built innovative plumbing and sewage systems and made bathhouses a distinct part of their culture. The take away from this formative period of human history is that, despite their common ancestry, all of these cultures could not have been more different from each other from a social evolution perspective. They believed vastly different stories about themselves and about the world out there. They believed they were fundamentally different from other humans in other places.
These narratives only strengthened as their societies grew into cities and into empires, and as hierarchies developed alongside laws, religions, familial values, and economic structures. They came to cherish the power of "us" versus "them", and began to wield these distinctions as natural bonding mechanisms, and as excuses for ongoing conflict over land and resources. After all, if you believed your people to be the one supreme group, it was then only your destiny to take what was rightfully yours. But then, you had no choice in the matter, belief was not a yes or no answer. Without believing you were different, better in some way than your adversaries, and therefore worthy of exerting power and dominion over others, you would not survive. History is riddled with societies that grew too comfortable, too relaxed, too isolated, too fat and happy, only to ultimately meet their demise at the hands of other groups, ones that were stronger and more ambitious. Life and death always seemed to come down to "us" versus "them - we, the one true human race, and everyone else who sat outside that distinction.
The Modern Era
How has this dynamic shifted in a modern context, if at all? Surely there have been many crucial evolutions of progress on the tendency to categorize "others". But then again, how are we to be certain that this progress has been ultimately desirable? After all, the 20th century saw the greatest number of deaths caused by war in the history of humanity. Yes, global populations have risen, and technology has improved, but the data is still relevant in depicting a modern society that, despite its attempts at integrating at a global level, has still found itself drawn into brutal conflicts and fierce opposition to outside narratives. We still find many instances of concretized beliefs in individual or societal supremacy, of nations fighting for global domination, of leaders wanting to gain advantages over an opposition — both civically and internationally. So where is the progress truly to be found?
I would like to answer that question by taking a philosophical view at the concept of cultural and societal separation — of "us" versus "them", so to speak. In order for a group of people to consider themselves as one cohesive unit separate from another they need certain qualities to fall back upon:
They need a home, or land; a place where they are welcomed, and somewhere they can return to at any time.
It is imperative for one to have a place of solace, where the threat of upheaval is not a constant factor looming over them. A country is such a place, or a city, a street, a home — a fixed place to return to upon a pilgrimage to the outside world. Bottom line is: people need a distinct home base where they can feel safe and secluded.
They need a shared sense of history.
One needs some amount of understanding of their origins, because such stories serve as reliable bonding mechanisms for people who would otherwise find it difficult to relate to one another. The lives of a citizenry differ greatly, even those living right next door to one another. But as long as they share a part of some similar history, then there is something to unite them, something beyond their control — a story that existed before, and that will continue to exist after. If our homes ground us, our history binds us together.
They need cultural values to live and abide by.
One also needs to rely on the fact that there are certain cultural values that often remain unspoken and yet fully integrated into a society, so that each person is able to cohere to behaviours and customs that enable each of them to harmonize with one another. If shared history binds us together, our cultural values allow us to live together, peacefully and beneficially.
They need systems of social organization.
There is also the manner in which a society is organized to provide the greatest benefit to its people. One needs an understanding towards the order of such things, an understanding of a societies laws and practices, of its methods of trade and commerce, and of the opportunities available for them to thrive and succeed. Without organizing principles, and governmental laws, susceptibility to power and corruption becomes inevitable. These tendencies can undoubtedly appear even among the most orderly and temperate of places, but there is no denying that an instance without a centrally defined authority of some kind would be incapable of organizing in a coherent and lasting way.
They need a unifying direction aimed at creating the conditions of future prosperity.
Finally, one also needs to believe that everyone who is borrowing a share of the land and its resources is of a similiar outlook toward the future. They need to believe that their neighbours are just as concerned as they are with maintaining the equal opportunity of all members, so that they may be given the free right to pursue their own contributions to the whole. One must understand that the conditions required to enable freedom of movement and of opportunity to succeed are immutable characteristics of a healthy and prosperous society. Without this unifying principle, a society is at risk of severe disruption to the social order.
The Post-Modernist Perspective
From a post-modern perspective, the idea of "us" versus "them" has been exasperated to quite a large degree. The post-modernist tendency is to continue the denominations with which we divide people, by slicing ever finer lines along the categories of individual identification. The result however, is somewhat counter-intuitive to their desired goal.
One aspect of post-modernist thought is the deconstruction of historical narratives that typically would serve as the glue binding societies together across vast ranges of social and economic spectrums. They suspected that such narratives were not only unnecessary to human flourishing, but also counter-productive, as they imposed limitations on progress, and made for an environment in which individuals were bound by socially designed values and beliefs that were made to be acceptable and desirable. They thought that by removing such barriers, individuals would be free to select their own personal distinctions, rendering them happier and more accepting of their differences.
But by attempting to remove this shared cohesion, there would be space opened up to allow for the insertion of new narratives — the empty space must be filled by something.
Part of the deconstruction process is the construction of many more categories of identification — more ways to divide "us" from "them". This makes for an even grainier level of coherence among a population — a group of supposedly aligned individuals — because subsequent to all of that division is a society that no longer views its shared historical, cultural, and organizational principles as sources of shared unification. Instead, neighbours are taught to notice their differences rather than their similiarities to one another, and that coarseness can make relationships a very difficult task. They become liable to all manner of breaking points, because individuals can be given a seemingly endless amount of identifiable qualities and characteristics with which to be categorized.
The post-modernist dilemma has come under heavy amounts of scrutiny in recent years, as the effects of the philosophies that led to it have been observed, recorded, and rebuked by many. Division has come to an all time high it seems, and it has become clear that this level of animosity between individuals who share the same "house", so to speak, is an untenable situation. There is little doubt that it has left its mark, but where can we go from here?
Two Truths
Two things are clear to me which also contradict each other. The first is that human beings cannot endure without sharing a sense of identity with one another. In other words, we must feel as though we are a part of something in order so that we feel safe, secure, supported, and understood by our peers — we need unification to ideals higher than what we ourselves can manage. We do this by instinctively offsetting values to the group in which we are members. As long as we feel as though we have some ability to cohere with the group mindset, even if our opinions of certain aspects of it may vary, then we are able to remain suitably aligned in a community where the outcome of our own actions, and those of other members, are largely predictable and sustainable.
The second, and contradictory point, is that we have simultaneously arrived at a moment in time where we have begun to recognize that cohesion and unification ought not be something disparately applied; that this natural human tendency to want to accept others for their differences, regardless of their past, place, and preferences is correct in its overall aim. In other words, we are attempting to "re-define" those same barriers that, although may unite certain groups of people, also serve to divide, or separate out, "others". This is something like what the post-modernist system says to my understanding of it, and where I would agree that its root cause is noble. But methods cannot be ignored, and it is in those methods where the inevitable breakdown of unification always occurs, and division ensues.
The Unification Ideal
The world feels as though it is constantly getting smaller, not larger. We are becoming more connected than ever before, and these connections are expanding the frame of unification further and further out, and giving us more ways to relate to one another. Yet, despite our connectedness, there is still the feeling that tranquility is nowhere to be found, nor will it ever be.
In this process of unification, we find both an ongoing expansion of the frame — growing the ways in which we find commonality — and a contraction back into the shared message — turning back towards the shared rules and narratives that bind us together. Over time, we have seen this idea evolve to encompass a planetary wide network of like-mindedness. Think from where we came: from small tribes, to humble villages, to bustling cities, to dominant empires and countries, and today to international organizations such as sporting leagues and corporations. Each stage of human social evolution has resulted in more ways for us to find a sense of connection with other people situated far away from us. Suddenly, we have the capacity to find common ground with people living in places that are totally alien to us, all because we are able to recognize the shared rules and narratives that bind us in some unique way, and that in turn govern a mutual understanding and cohesion.
However, at the same time, these expanded connections have also revealed many more ways in which we are different. In short, our increased access to one another also means that we can formulate far more complex categorizations of “others” and their “separateness”.
So what then is the next step in this process of unification? We have come a long way since that early river valley civilization period. From little to no connection, we have come to embrace a massively changed world. One might suspect that the next stage of social evolution could be related to the adoption of A.I. systems in which we are currently experiencing a shift in thinking. It is likely the case that A.I. will enable more ways for us to connect and collaborate, allowing us to form new ideas and new paradigms that allow us to even further integrate with one another. But ultimately, that still locks us onto Earth and its limited domain. Thinking bigger than the boundaries of this planet allows us to properly expand the frame once again, beyond the borders of our arbitrary lands.
So to borrow again from the the process previously described, what might it predict will be the next monumental step in our endless journey toward a humanity-sized unification ideal?
The Future Prediction
To my mind, the next stage is soon on the horizon. Soon, we will not be merely confined to the to the upper limits of this Earth, and thus will come to venture out far beyond it. As our penchant for exploration always predicts, if there is a place we wish to get to, it is only a matter of time before we find our way there. We are nothing if not explorers, and we can always rely upon our curiosity to guide us forth. After all, we have an incredible ability to make the im-possible, possible - "to boldly go where no one has gone before". Venturing out into space, the (perhaps not-so-)final frontier, will enable that next fundamental step toward humanity's unified purpose.
Above all, what our adventures away from this world will provide is an entirely new way of looking back at ourselves, a new kind of contractable viewing angle, and a new way of understanding what it means to be human. Tamim Ansary discusses an idea in his book about how ancient people made use of terms that referred to themselves as "the people", or "the humans". These distinctions made it clear that other people were separated out of that grouping by virtue of their "otherness". In other words, the mindset was us (humans), and them (the non-humans — often "barbarians"). This ancient notion has admittedly expanded quite a bit over the millennia that followed, again in line with our expanded social frames, but what we have today is still in effect a complex version of that same basic idea. We know we are all humans, but we do not necessarily walk around describing ourselves as such. Instead, we treat the word "human" as an umbrella term encompassing an enormous variety of further identifiable traits, ones that we far more readily use in describing ourselves and where we come from. But what will happens to that umbrella term and the connotations that follow it when we are light years away from home, out in search of new worlds and new life? What will it mean to be a "human" then?
The travelling nomadic bands of the future era will be out among the stars, with Earth as a distant object. In that frame of mind, the distillation of what we think of as "us" condenses the entirety of the human species into a single reference point, an Earth-sized home base, and it ignores all previous geographical and cultural distinctions. Cities, communities, and countries would all become arbitrary lines written by previous generations concerned with dividing human identity between lines on paper. But what relevance will those lines possess when babies are being born on spaceships and on other planets? What about when we are meeting new life? Suddenly those past differences would seem trivial, and a distant concern. At that point, the sense of shared history and identity will have expanded its frame once again, further than ever before, ushering in a new evolution of human social interaction. A new stage in the process of unification will have been brought to bear, and humanity will have gained a higher identity - a shared origin for all, where the history, culture, and philosophy of generations combine into one unique form. "We are humanity, and we come from Earth."
Conclusion
While I feel comfortable in predicting that our adventures into the cosmos will be the catalyst for the next era of humanity's journey toward "One-ness", I feel far less confident in predicting how this will also affect our tendency to find further levels of division. We always manage to find new ways with which to divide ourselves, and I have little doubt that we will continue that tradition in many more as-yet-undefined ways. Perhaps as we come to live on distant planets, travel and explore with different space-faring groups, or work alongside competing cosmic corporations, we will begin to write the next chapter in that story. But there is something to be said about the fact that history cannot be easily re-written, and as such this Earth will always be our one true origin.
I subscribe to the notion that it has never been easier to spot the minute differences between separate groups of people. This is largely owed to the fact of our maximized connectedness, and to our enlightened knowledge of "others" and of the many complex ways in which they appear to act differently from us. But the reverse of that notion is also true, in that, it has never been easier to relate to other distant people, again through that shared connectedness. Perhaps the takeaway from all of this observation then, is that, expanding the lens through which we view ourselves has the effect of amplifying both our differences and our similarities. With that perspective, it is worth considering how our differences will manifest once they are no longer confined to the boundaries of a single planet, and instead, bound to the endless expanse of an infinite universe.
There is only one true way in which we are all the same, and yet, an infinite amount in which we could be different. Let us hope that we choose wisely.
LP