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Hope for the Future
Sep. 19th, 2015 10:34 pmToday I want to talk about hope. Not just hope in the "within my lifetime" sense, but hope in general, for all of us, for humanity as a whole. There's a lot of pessimism in the air these days, what with ISIS, global warming, and a million other problems we can't currently see our way out of, and I want to put these problems in their proper context.
That said, I want to acknowledge that hope isn't easy on some days. Some days, hope is the hardest thing in the world, because the world itself seems almost bereft of it. You wake up and do your thing, and some story or bit of news comes your way and derails everything, because "What does it matter in the end?" On those days, you feel so small and insignificant, and the historical trends feel so huge, that it's all you can do to not be crushed beneath their weight. That thought... that despair is what I want to focus on today, and I want to attack it from two angles. 1) Your contribution does matter, always, even if you fail (and all of us do). 2) In the context of both history and future, these problems are tiny. It is only to us in the present that they are huge.
Number 1 is the one you hear all the time. While I'm going to address it, I'm not going to start there. I'm going to start with #2: historical and future context.
The history of modern civilization is less than 5000 years old. With any luck, that will some day extend into the many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Humanity will change and grow... and will continue to make mistakes, as we always have. Those mistakes we make *now* will be as nothing on the scale our species will one day span. Some of them may be more formative than others (global warming in particular), but some (the LGBT rights struggle, for example), are destined to be a distant memory, simply something that has long since passed. For a little additional framing help, I'd recommend scanning over this post (and a few comments) by Charles Stross (one of my favorite authors), where he performs a thought experiment on how to summarize the period from 1700-2300 CE for a future history class. It's a pretty interesting read all its own. Another two books that I can't recommend highly enough (and which inspired this post) are Karl Schroeder's Permanence, and one by Fredrich Pohl's The Boat of a Million Years. They're both sci-fi novels that will give you different, but unique and amazing views of truly deep time.
So let's talk about problems and about scale. Deep time isn't something we talk about on a daily basis, but let's be honest here. We all hope that humanity will flourish, and that our species, along with our stories and our hearts, will one day leap into the stars. Though we're not sure how it may one day end, we hope that we can be a force for beauty long into the distant future. And please realize, when I say distant future, I don't mean another thousand years, as stunning a time frame as *that* alone is. I mean hundreds of thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of years. On such a timescale, our current civilizational structure cannot hope to cope with our future needs. I'm sure that parts will be borrowed, modified, and perhaps even mirrored, but time will plow under many things we now take for granted.
Let's take LGBT rights as an example. One hundred and fifty years from now (the same temporal distance that separates us from legalized slavery in the United States), can you imagine LGBT rights still being an issue in this country? What about a thousand years? Can you imagine hold-outs anywhere on the planet? Islam itself is less than 1500 years old, Christianity another ~600 beyond that. Will these things endure science and slow cultural progress for that length of time? And even if they do, 1000 years from now, can you imagine a world in which we have not already begun to colonize the solar system? We have always been explorers, and I cannot imagine our drive for beauty and creation being stifled for another hundred, let alone another thousand, years.
So let's take that step. In a world where Earth is still the center of civilization, even with small colonies existing on the edge of collapse, can you imagine those involved in the science and development of those places bringing primitive cultural ideals along with? Can you imagine one of those first ten thousand (to pick a number) being unused to working with a female scientist, let alone a transgender one? That's simply not how these circles work. The logic and critical thinking that real science requires is poison to both faith and bigotry, because that lens is sooner or later applied introspectively, by children if no-one else. The next step, a self-sufficient solar economy, is even larger, as is the next, tenuous connections with worlds beyond our own solar system. Bigotry and hatred will not stop, when we reach those scales, but their impacts on civilization as a whole will be severely diluted. The steps beyond that? I'd ask "Who can say?", but I've read Permanence lately. ;)
So yeah, the magnitude of crises and the energies needed to solve them are both a matter of scale. We've a great many right now, and I won't lie. They're terrifying. We're early enough in the development of our species that we /could/ really fuck things up here. But there is so much out there to work for that it'd be terrible to waste our potential. And that's why we all need to do our part. Yeah, it's insignificant. Yeah, we might screw up and end up doing something that actually hurts in the end. But those of us who try have always made a difference, and together we are mighty. From the earliest philosophers and scientists, to the educators and engineers of today, we have *always* made the difference. Sometimes we lose our way and we build for the past, assembling bombs, finding poisons, and working to tear down what others have built. More often, though, we build for the future, and we have to do that now. All of us.
Edmund Burke once said that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I'm not certain exactly what he had in mind when he put those words to pen, but I think he'd use them again now. Let's build for our children... all of our children. Time will see to the rest.
That said, I want to acknowledge that hope isn't easy on some days. Some days, hope is the hardest thing in the world, because the world itself seems almost bereft of it. You wake up and do your thing, and some story or bit of news comes your way and derails everything, because "What does it matter in the end?" On those days, you feel so small and insignificant, and the historical trends feel so huge, that it's all you can do to not be crushed beneath their weight. That thought... that despair is what I want to focus on today, and I want to attack it from two angles. 1) Your contribution does matter, always, even if you fail (and all of us do). 2) In the context of both history and future, these problems are tiny. It is only to us in the present that they are huge.
Number 1 is the one you hear all the time. While I'm going to address it, I'm not going to start there. I'm going to start with #2: historical and future context.
The history of modern civilization is less than 5000 years old. With any luck, that will some day extend into the many hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Humanity will change and grow... and will continue to make mistakes, as we always have. Those mistakes we make *now* will be as nothing on the scale our species will one day span. Some of them may be more formative than others (global warming in particular), but some (the LGBT rights struggle, for example), are destined to be a distant memory, simply something that has long since passed. For a little additional framing help, I'd recommend scanning over this post (and a few comments) by Charles Stross (one of my favorite authors), where he performs a thought experiment on how to summarize the period from 1700-2300 CE for a future history class. It's a pretty interesting read all its own. Another two books that I can't recommend highly enough (and which inspired this post) are Karl Schroeder's Permanence, and one by Fredrich Pohl's The Boat of a Million Years. They're both sci-fi novels that will give you different, but unique and amazing views of truly deep time.
So let's talk about problems and about scale. Deep time isn't something we talk about on a daily basis, but let's be honest here. We all hope that humanity will flourish, and that our species, along with our stories and our hearts, will one day leap into the stars. Though we're not sure how it may one day end, we hope that we can be a force for beauty long into the distant future. And please realize, when I say distant future, I don't mean another thousand years, as stunning a time frame as *that* alone is. I mean hundreds of thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of years. On such a timescale, our current civilizational structure cannot hope to cope with our future needs. I'm sure that parts will be borrowed, modified, and perhaps even mirrored, but time will plow under many things we now take for granted.
Let's take LGBT rights as an example. One hundred and fifty years from now (the same temporal distance that separates us from legalized slavery in the United States), can you imagine LGBT rights still being an issue in this country? What about a thousand years? Can you imagine hold-outs anywhere on the planet? Islam itself is less than 1500 years old, Christianity another ~600 beyond that. Will these things endure science and slow cultural progress for that length of time? And even if they do, 1000 years from now, can you imagine a world in which we have not already begun to colonize the solar system? We have always been explorers, and I cannot imagine our drive for beauty and creation being stifled for another hundred, let alone another thousand, years.
So let's take that step. In a world where Earth is still the center of civilization, even with small colonies existing on the edge of collapse, can you imagine those involved in the science and development of those places bringing primitive cultural ideals along with? Can you imagine one of those first ten thousand (to pick a number) being unused to working with a female scientist, let alone a transgender one? That's simply not how these circles work. The logic and critical thinking that real science requires is poison to both faith and bigotry, because that lens is sooner or later applied introspectively, by children if no-one else. The next step, a self-sufficient solar economy, is even larger, as is the next, tenuous connections with worlds beyond our own solar system. Bigotry and hatred will not stop, when we reach those scales, but their impacts on civilization as a whole will be severely diluted. The steps beyond that? I'd ask "Who can say?", but I've read Permanence lately. ;)
So yeah, the magnitude of crises and the energies needed to solve them are both a matter of scale. We've a great many right now, and I won't lie. They're terrifying. We're early enough in the development of our species that we /could/ really fuck things up here. But there is so much out there to work for that it'd be terrible to waste our potential. And that's why we all need to do our part. Yeah, it's insignificant. Yeah, we might screw up and end up doing something that actually hurts in the end. But those of us who try have always made a difference, and together we are mighty. From the earliest philosophers and scientists, to the educators and engineers of today, we have *always* made the difference. Sometimes we lose our way and we build for the past, assembling bombs, finding poisons, and working to tear down what others have built. More often, though, we build for the future, and we have to do that now. All of us.
Edmund Burke once said that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I'm not certain exactly what he had in mind when he put those words to pen, but I think he'd use them again now. Let's build for our children... all of our children. Time will see to the rest.
