A Brief History of Us
Part of the challenge facing humanity in the 21st century is the loss of old ideas that united us. Many of these concepts, whether myths, historical traditions, religions, or political values defined distinct cultures limited by geography. However, despite numerous superficial differences, many of these ideas held deeper shared values.
Today, across the planet, these old ideas and values are challenged, broken, or discarded. It is not well understood the chief catalyst of this cultural shattering has been the great science and resulting technology revolutions of the past several centuries, eliminating centuries and even millennia of geographical separation, simultaneously tearing apart the thought and values previously providing cultural unity. Every culture’s shared limitation was nowhere, at any time in history, was the existential unity of homo sapiens as a species respected or even understood. Now, a technologically created global culture is entirely fragmented, comprised of disparate half-discarded cultural values and ill-formed new ones, making effective politics impossible anywhere.
Necessarily, any healthy future culture will include knowledge gained by science and an understanding of the cultural designing power of science's technological progeny. This incorporation needs to include not simply hard know-how, though that is essential, but creative analogies explaining humanity's past story leading to the 21st century. One of the most immediate needs are helpful metaphors illuminating our relationship to earth's larger environment. With the mass adoption of industrial technologies, all such previous metaphors have been annihilated. Replaced by the technologies rather crude and quite primitive cultures, which are inadequate to understanding technology, their created environments, and completely devoid of any understanding of how these novel technological environments relate to the earth’s larger ecology.
One helpful analogy is to approach the history of homo sapiens' interactions with the planetary environment as that of a superorganism. By this I mean instead of looking across human history's impact on earth as the separate actions of billions of individuals, perceive it as the collective action of one large life form. Imagine being perched in a position high enough above the earth where you can't see human individuals or their separate actions, but only observe the collective impact upon the earth's surface of this single superorganism.
From this select height, observing the creation of homo sapiens' until today, for the vast majority of time, you'd little discern our existence. The planet's landscape and ecology appear unaltered by human activity. For most of human existence, we depended on hunting and gathering, basically tiny level disruption to the greater ecology from which we evolved. Seventy thousand or so years ago, you would not notice our migration(s) out of Africa to the Middle East, then across southern Asia all the way to Australia, or then up across Asia and Europe. Completely indiscernible is the migration from Asia to the Americas fifteen thousand year ago.
Then suddenly, beginning in the Middle East around ten thousand years ago, patterned green etchings scratched into the earth appear, particularly along rivers. Over several thousand years, these patterns expand, appearing on the Indian subcontinent and China. Over thousands of years, the Indus, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers, along with the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile in Africa, these patterned etchings proliferate.
Looking as close as possible from your perch, among these scratched patterns, you start discerning slightly raised, mostly rectangular brown, white, and gray geometric patterns, separated by either curved or straight lines. Gradually these patterns grow in size and concentration. Over time, in the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, a few large pyramid shapes are interspersed. The lines themselves begin stretching across one concentration of rectangular forms to another. Web like patterns of connection develop across increasingly larger geographic areas.
Then two things become apparent. First, many of the patterns gradually fade or disappear entirely as new ones emerge. Secondly, the surrounding spaces are increasingly altered. In certain areas, what were vast swathes of protruding green vistas are leveled, some replaced with the etched patterns, others replaced with flatter, different shades of green rolling landscapes. Some previously brown space areas turn into scratched patterns of green, other previously green areas turn brown.
Over ten thousand years, the etched patterns intersperse with the slightly raised, rectangular, horizontally latticed patterns emerge across the planet, covering large stretches of Asia and Europe and scattered across the Americas, particularly vibrant in Central America and along stretches of the Andes. In Africa, the patterns remain more scattered, concentrated in certain areas, absent across the large continent of Australia. Then five hundred years ago, the patterns emerge in a more concentrated way across the Americas, various areas of Africa, and in the last two centuries around the Australian coasts.
If over the course of ten thousand years, from your perch, you visually recorded the growth of these patterns, then replayed them over a matter of minutes, the change of the earth's face would be astounding, patterns expanding, connecting, and contracting across large areas the planet's surface. In earth's long history, a relatively new organism, for much of its existence globally imperceptible, in a relatively very short time radically alters the planet's observed landscape and ecology.
Yet, this ten thousand year great agrarian and beginning of the urban change pales in comparison to the increase in size and structural change of two and half centuries of industrialism. From your perch, you witness the emergence of larger distinct rectangular structures attached with tall columns belching smoke. These structures appear first in northern Europe and the eastern United States, in just a century rapidly grow across much of Europe and half the North American continent.
Simultaneously, the concentrated, horizontally latticed rectangular structures expand in size, swallowing many of the immediately adjacent established green etchings. New etched green patterns expand across the greater landscape. The web of lines connecting the concentrated expanse of interlaced structures grows ever more intricate, expanding in all directions, with ever more lines connected to ever greater concentrated interlaced structural centers. In many places, rectangular structures reach higher and higher into the sky.
In the last century, the large rectangular structures with their columns of smoke expand into areas of South America, Australia, a few places in Africa, then wildly sprout over the last half century across much of east Asia.
Other noticeable changes occur across much of the planet's surface. Once free running water ways are walled off, pooling great expanses of water behind them. The columns of smoke emanating from the larger structures combine with ever increasing smog arising from the concentrated latticed patterned rectangular structures, change the color of the air in the immediate areas, eventually tinging the encompassing atmosphere of the entire earth. At the same time, increasingly large areas of the remaining protruding vibrant green areas burn and are leveled, shrinking in size across the planet, especially along the equator in Africa, South America, and Asia.
Finally and most spectacularly, beginning around a century and half ago, the areas of latticed rectangular concentrations begin glowing at night, spreading across much of the planet's surface to an extent the entire superorganism appears luminescent.
This short thought exercise looks to simplistically reveal the immense change homo sapiens have effected upon the planet. Most importantly, it seeks to impart the homogeneity of this change brought about by our scientific knowledge and resulting technologies. Looking from this perspective height, the seeming great diversity and disparities of human history, our cultures, politics, and economics, meld into a congruous set of patterns of action and results that just as well may have been created by one single superorganism.
Yet, today's politics, economics, and culture barely acknowledge either this change or from this perspective, the complete uniformity of the human species. The consequences of this great transformation of the planet's ecology increasingly exert ever greater pressures across all human society. To meet these challenges will require understanding, no matter what political, economic, and cultural diversity we wish to place on top, that in our most fundamental elemental interactions with the ecology of this earth, we are one – e pluribus unum.