“I like what you said about how we (as early humans) started developing a world-view.”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yes, it is. Not in so many words, but you were talking about how we started developing ideas. Ideas about our own role in this diverse world that we were beginning to observe and understand like never before.
Because we started asking why.”
“Yea man, I guess I did say that. I mean… when you start asking why, that’s when you start putting yourself into it right? That’s when you go from simply reacting what goes down, to getting things to go down for you. To even think in those terms is empowering. Questioning why is the first step to finding your own answers.
And THAT is radical power dude.”
“Very well said my friend. It is with ideas about how and why the systems we observe function, and then creating functioning systems for ourselves, that we have become powerful. Instead of simply being subjugated by the powerful forces of nature and totally at the mercy of our environment, we are now the architects (or at least co-creators) of whatever environments best suit our vision of who we want to be.
That is how we have become a species with a self-directed evolutionary process. Because of this, we may just manage to build a real civilization sometime in the future.”
“Yea but sometimes it’s like civilization is starting to really go nuts right? I mean… people certainly SEEM to be less and less civil nowadays.”
“Yes, well… this perception is why we need to look back at prehistory and so on, to get a rational perspective when discussing current issues. We need to be clear about the nature of the challenges we have already been through, so we can now face these new ones and move forward with well-reasoned action. Even if it does entail some radical changes like you seem to be all about.”
“Oh yea?”
“Yes, it was our naked friends here who brought up the paradox of our fear of the other and started this conversation. Our species is just beginning to grow out of an age-old paradigm based on that fear. We don’t want the pain that always accompanies growth, so we are seeing some of the inevitably painful aspects of this maturation process towards a new paradigm, as dangerous and wrong. We may even see them as backward since they so often lead to conflict.
But modern conflicts are very different from those of even the quite recent past.
Cognitive psychologist, linguist and science author Steven Pinker points out in The Angels of Our Better Nature, how per-capita violence and other metrics of civilized behavior have declined steadily throughout human history. He suggests that we are more civilized now than we have ever been and attributes much of this progress to powerful ideas such as democratic systems of government and the various human rights movements.
Through technology we now experience an unprecedented global interconnectedness that has afforded us greater cross-cultural mobility and communication than could have ever been even dreamed of less than a century ago. Thus these relatively new but very powerful ideas have spread in a very short time… evolutionarily speaking.”
“Cool dude. Yea, I get that we have already begun to dump some of our other-ing tendencies and made some pretty radical changes. But we still have a long way to go and a lot of the changes I’d like to see are still way radical in today’s world.”
“I’d like you to share some of those radical ideas of yours my friend, and I’d venture that our naked audience here, may like to hear them as well.”
“Yea Dude, let’s hear the radical stuff!”
——
To be continued…
