Halfback wrote:I seem to detect a lot of "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the world lived in peace, harmony and love"? in here. Yeah, it would. A lofty ideal and eminently supportable, in concept.
However, as long as there exists but one human (and by extension, family, tribe, group, region....) out of the population of the planet who does not "buy into" the program....... we end up exactly where we are now.
The world "society" as we find it today is not the result of careful and considered planning, but rather a result of how we have interacted with each other since man evolved. It has always been "them versus us" to one extent or another. To make it otherwise would require a complete remake of the human psyche as it pertains to social interaction for the greater portion of upwards of seven billion humans.
I submit that attempting to change the direction of a herd of seven billion is a good method to get trampled into the dirt. :wink:
Halfback
Agreed.
So what does one do when human nature shaped and sharpened over hundreds of thousands of years does not comply with one's sense of what is right?
Should one reassess one's sense of what is right?
What would it mean to being human if the nature that gives rise to tribalism were altered in order to do away with violent conflicts among nations?
The quaint notion of the lion laying down with the lamb has a fanciful appeal, but if it ever happened, it would mean the extinction of lions. Lions cannot survive on a vegan diet, and if the magic finger snap that caused them to lie down with the lamb was able to "fix it" so they could, they would stop being lions, and before long they would look remarkably like lambs.
At some point in the not too distant future we may have the ability to transform human nature through genetic engineering. Do we want to?
Do we trust those with the power to accomplish such a feat to limit their tinkering to tribalism, and even if we could, wouldn't the elimination of tribalism most assuredly have a negative impact on some of the qualities of human nature that we admire and wish to preserve?
There is some irony in the fact that the very same people who would lecture us for trying to seperate our species fate from that of nature in general, would so love to see us seperate ourselves from the evolutionary heritage we have been building for hundreds of thousands of years.
Tribalism is, obviously, a very effective survival mechanism. It is unlikely to disappear through the natural process of evolution...at least not in any time soon. It is also not going to be
overcome by righteous thinking and education. Even if one could, through education, convert an entire populace to a collection of pacifists with universal love for all mankind, the result would be similar to that of convincing the lamb to lie down with the lion, but leaving the lion as is.
It's all or nothing and that sort of effort can only be achieved in an environment of highly centralized control , and willingness (at least at the level of control) to impose a program of genetic engineering the scope of which is almost unfathomable to the 21st century mind.
Wouldn't it be wonderful...
I do think John Lennon was a dreamer, and irrespective of whether or not he was the only, he was dreaming. Dreams can be pretty though.