Yesterday, Broca’s area emitted a two-sentence version of the Mothers’ Day post: “Every born creature on this planet has a mother. It would be egocentric of me to give my own preferential treatment.” When I passed that along to Eve, it started an email exchange that prompted Broca and friends to further thought.
The issue that concern’s me is the conflict and hostility between groups, and I voiced thoughts on this subject in Bare Brains Episode’s Twelve and Thirteen. People identify themselves as belonging to a family, ethnic group, race, country, etc. They also identify themselves by their preference for certain sports teams, automobiles, computers, etc. Not every one of these sorts of preferences leads to violence, but the roots of violence are here, in the creation of us/them distinctions.
I have suggested that we might learn to broaden our identifications to include all of humanity, and there are movements in that direction, but I think that the ultimate solution will come when we learn to see ourselves as we truly are: a skin-bound eddy in an enormous process that encompasses the universe.
David Brooks ended the column I talked about yesterday with these lines, “We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.” As a result of that scientific revolution, the understanding of what we are will eventually become a part of universal knowledge: something everyone knows, raising their kids with that knowledge. We’re talking long-term, here: a thousand years?
One of the effects I foresee is that people will come to see all their preferences as accidents of their personal history. Everyone will realize that whether they like baseball or football, PC or Mac, salty or sweet, etc., those likes and dislikes have been totally determined by a cascade of processes that are beyond anyone’s control.
Our thoughts are not our own, except in terms of location. They come out of a recognizably individual organism, but they are no more the result of undetermined choices than are your fingerprints. A thorough understanding of that fact should improve everyone’s sense of humor.
We are of the universe, and there is no more reason for hostility between us than there is for hostility between the Earth and the Moon, unless, of course, you have food and I have none.
There are problems of scarcity and distribution that need desperately to be solved, but hopefully, the realization that these differences, too, are the result of historical accident will help us to solve them amicably. No one deserves to be rich or poor, to be praised or demeaned for their circumstances. We are all enmeshed in forces beyond our control, but those forces are not static. They are moving us toward a better understanding of ourselves and our problems. There is hope.
Controlled by Celestial Forces