Below is the working draft-intro of a nonfiction book I'd like to complete (while another part of me says it is a waste of time, except maybe for therapeutic purposes).
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Draft Intro for the nonfiction book "Better Angels" [temp title][a work in progress]
Introduction for Better Angels
Good and Light
In the future, there could be trillions of humans, far
happier, healthier and more aware than we are today, spread throughout the
galaxy. The prospect is not all that
inconceivable, and it rests on two simple premises. First, that technology will be able to
support it. Second, that governments
will be able to successfully implement more sophisticated ethical systems.
In terms of the first premise, concerning technology, the
advances continue to astound. Given the
accelerating reach of tech, the
bottleneck seems to be the second premise.
The question, then, is this: does
‘human nature’ keep us from ethical progress?
Is it possible, at all, for a government to implement an advanced
ethical system, the sort that could optimize human flourishing?
Try to imagine: What if instead of greed or power
lust, the primary focus of society became something truly good, an optimized harmony
of human and planetary health?
Is it feasible?
In this book, I answer with an empathic, logic-based
affirmative. Even so, what I say will sound
ironic and even absurd. Why? Ever since the beginning of civilization, we
have been trained to think otherwise. In
one sense, the answer is simple. And
yet the solution is impossible, given the ongoing cultural trap that does its
best to keep us broken. The path forward
is easy and yet irremediable. We have
the ability to optimize our flourishing, to maximize our human and ecosystemic
health, but most likely we won’t.
The greatest irony is that, as I write this ode to our grand,
beautiful potential (and, as well, to our considerable moral victories so far)
we tilt on the precipice of final failure.
Very soon, the experiment of civilization, thousands of years old, quite
likely will self-destruct from the deployment of weapons too powerful to be
wielded responsibly by ethical infants:
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We
know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know
about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon
on the Mount. (Omar Bradley)
The Importance
Given such doom-saying, one might ask, why bother with
a project of Good and Light?
First, there is some chance that we will avoid a large-scale
war. If not, perhaps some decent and sturdy
remnant of society will survive. Second,
the project I propose is generic. It
applies not only to our universe, but to any life-giving universe with the same
physical laws, materials and origin. The
broad concept of the Good I develop can be employed by AI, or by sentient
xenolife, as well as by wise humans, to approach a world that is more like
heaven. I write to a grand cosmogonic
template, one that validates and mobilizes the effect that a collective character
can have on an entire galaxy or even a universe.
One way to envision an advantageous
path would be to run algorithmic strategies, both governmental and cultural, on
simulated worlds. As computers become
more powerful, in conjunction with machine learning, our research into how to make
practical progress toward a Good world becomes more realistic and
efficacious.
A third reason to study the Good, even while our society deteriorates, is that it can be personally fulfilling and beneficial. There is quintessential meaning in an intentful
act, one which sends a virtuous message to the universe. Such an act soars, heartful and heavenly, above
the barbaric machiavellianism that oversees humanity today. When embraced from a defiant place, amid a
dominance of despair and loneliness, surrounded by a sea of conformity, such an
embrace of the Good is even more lovely.
At certain junctures in our lives, we are each of us called
to introspect. If we heed that call, we may
ask with a searing honesty, “Have I livedd a meaningful life? Have I investigated, even, what a good life
could be?”
After asking such a question, it is quite easy to
retreat, to slam the door shut on the introspective part of the soul, a part
that tends to be vulnerable. Daring is
no guarantee against falling back into condoned, conformist fabrications of expression. Liberation, like quitting cigarettes or leaving an abusive spouse, can be a process.
And yet, it is possible to persist. To be courageous and candid. Dare we consider the very crux of our souls, the
ladders of our choices, right and wrong, which lead us up or carry us downward?
A serious investigation of the the Good probes the moral worth of a life: ‘Have I climbed, at least a little,
toward the Good and its forms of beauty and wonder, of health and majesty?’
A fourth reason to focus on the Good, despite the
overweening presence of Evil in our world today, is that the alternative is a nightmarish
future. Just as we can wield AI to
advance human flourishing, we can mobilize it for enslavement and surveillance. The higher the tech level of a society, the
more that society can not only project its beliefs onto the citizenry, but shape
the very nature of the physical environment.
A society where every citizen is fitted with a brain implants, monitored
by ubiquitous AI, and policed by mindless robots is increasing possible. Under the rulership of narcissistic,
psychopathic leaders who compulsively seek more control to feed their bottomless, broken egos, such a future, once it becomes technologically viable, is inevitable.
What is the Good?
At the core of the Good, as I discuss below, are three
elements: honesty, mutuality and
equality. Social democracy, situated
in dignity, compassion, and human rights, provides a template for mutually
beneficial relationships. This contrasts
with the ‘limited pie,’ zero-sum worldview of conquerors and dividers who see
only ‘winners and losers.’
Another aspect of my answer concerning Good or Light, is that
ethics is a technology, one that can have higher and lower forms. The level is determined, not by dogmatic
tradition, but instead through empirically verifiable standards. As ethics advances in tech level, philosophical
wisdom evolves to mesh with the discoveries of science.
In an advanced society, ethics harmonizes with psychology
and medicine. It assimilates knowledge
gained through the rigors of experimentation, and mobilizes it via the praxis of
engineering.
When ethics and technology merge and ascend, they
approach the possibility of a wondrous state, a trek toward heaven: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.” (Kurtzweil)
A Project of Light
A Project of Light is a quest to lay a plausible path
toward a Good world. Even more, it is an
attempt to bring about such a world. A
Project of Light can be contrasted with the Manhattan Project, which lay a tangible
route for Evil’s ultimate triumph. The
invention of nuclear weapons threatens the end of civilizaion itself.
Sadly, the success of the Manhattan Project was celebrated
darkly in the recent movie Oppenheimer, including a claim that it was
humanity’s greatest achievement. Even
such slanted praise is egregiously wrongheaded.
The only way to defeat Evil is Good.
A Project of Light--the nurturance of an embedded, resistant culture of
wise, mature, healthy citizens--would be, if accomplished, by far humanity’s
greatest invention. It would, by its
nature, eliminate the scourge of war, and make so-called ‘weapons of
deterrence,’ which are signposts on the road to doom, obsolete.
“Ah, if only people were wise and meant well, the world
would be a paradise, while now it is usually hell.” --inscription on a plaque, Domus Spinozana,
The Hague
As noted above, a Project of Light marshals science in
all its manifestations, such as physics and chemistry, the physical branches, as
well as the mental branches, including psychology and sociology. It incorporates living science, the realms of
biology and medicine, and environmental sciences, like zoology and ecology. It does so not to create some ultimate weapon
or means of totalitarian mind control, but rather to bring about a Good society
and maintain it.
A Pivotal Point
As general technology becomes more powerful, more able to alter the
physical world and the mind, a fork emerges before us. We can
choose a path of compassion, which is democratic. Or we can choose a path of oppression, which
is totalitarian. As it stands, right
now, in 2025, the world is tilting toward the latter, epitomized by the
deterioration of the American republic into a dictatorship under a man who has
been diagnosed by many professionals as a narcissistic psychopath. The voices of dozens of experts combine to warn us (The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump).
The Role of Religion
What is happiness?
What is health? What is the best
way to determine the right thing to do? Such
questions must be front and center in an approach to the Good. In pursuit of answers, philosophy and ethics accord with reason,
especially the need to avoid fallacious and specious rhetoric.
Moreover, the discipline of ethics is secular and unprejudiced. That said, any religious or traditional
practice can align itself with the Good, as long as it sheds dogma that
conflicts with the core standards discussed below, the three elements of what I
call home: honesty, mutuality and
equality.
All today’s major religions could be a lens to see and
approach the Good, but not the versions hardened by traditional dogma; for
instance, those calling LGBTQ people sinful or claiming that women must obey men.
As the Dali Lama proposes in Beyond Relgion, the
Good transcends any one practice. And
yet it is spiritual in its respect for the Creation. To revel in divine awe is to
enrich the human experience. What
philosophers call an entelechy, that is, the highest state of flourishing, is open to an artistry which savors the beauteous and miraculous world. Enlightenment finds reverence that is not
simply aesthetic but morally keen.
Our Relationship with emotion (and psychology)
Morality and ethics, as I use the terms, are fairly interchangeable (the former could be said to lean toward a spiritual aspect). They require critical thinking and acknowledgement of the standards of reason. However, reason is not what many people think it is. The true nature of the reasoning process is often wrongly misunderstood to require the elimination of passion and emotion. Nothing could be further from the cogent.
A respect for the divine is not to disparage our daily,
grounded experience. The sensuous and the
earthly are aspects of the awe-inspiring wonder that is the universe:
To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a
wildflower. (Blake)
Above, I emphasize the importance of science in an
approach toward the Good. But just as
important are the Humanties:
The human race is filled with passion. And medicine,
law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain
life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love,
these are what we stay alive for.-- Dead Poets Society
The despair of logicians is the humanist's glory. --Houston Smith
A historical bias against emotion and women
Western culture, throughout its tenure, has had a broken
relationship with emotion and, as well, women, whose assigned gender is traditionally associated with emotion. In contrast, men have been called the rational half of the species, going back thousands of years. Emotion and women have often been associated with lower, ‘earthly’ sinful states, in opposition to higher realms of intellectual thought.
However, as we are learning from both
neuroscience and philosophy, there is no simple bifurcation between logic and emotion. Martha Nussbaum writes that emotion can be an
“upheaval” of thought, and that in this capacity it is not necessarily an enemy of
reason.
Emotion can be blind, yes, but so can the detached
mode of observation we refer to as objectivity. Sometimes we should ‘listen to the heart,’ and certainly not suppress
it.
A classic example is the Cartesian scientists who, theorizing that dogs were just machines--mere clockwork, as Descartes argued--vivisected the dogs for research, which is to say, they cut the dogs open while they were still alive. Showing compassion that the humans lacked, the dogs sometimes licked the hands of their tormentors.
Concurrence with common sense leads to a simple yet often
ignored truth: to advance our understanding
and to live well is to listen to and work with emotions and passions.
This fully applies to the Good. To seek
the Good is a moral enterprise. And the best moral arguments and apprehensions
draw from the interconnectivity of the 100 trillion connections of the tens of billions
of neurons in the brain, that vast inner galaxy nestled in our skulls, where reason and emotion
interplay and merge.
Ethical infants psychologically immature
Sadly, because we are ethical infants, we have little
knowledge of how to deal with, immerse in, or generally listen to our emotions,
despite their centrality to moral reasoning and a meaningful life. A great deal of our trouble is due to millennia of patriarchy: how a closed, war-centered culture has throttled our ability to perceive and
express. This is particularly
true of males, who often can’t even identify what they are feeling. However, the ancient gender roles hamper women as well, who are expected to be polite, yielding, kind and to suppress anger and outrage.
Importantly, such a stunted emotional status, especially
for males, is not fated. There is even a
name for the common male condition now:
normative male alexithymia. It is
significant that psychologists have taken this step. Admittance
and identification are critical for resolution.
Because it is at the crux of everything I argue, I want
to emphasize: It is not fated that
males will be emotionally broken.
If this is hard for you to accept, ask why. A partial answer is that society has never reached
emotional competence in the general population, especially the leadership, Never.
Macho has always been an the norm. Macho
leads to war, and every time there is a war--and there have been countless wars
since the start of civilization-- it leaves a generational scar of ugliness and
darkness, a terrible wound, which adds to our shared cultural trauma.
Can civilization overcome the psychic wounds
that blight the mental evolution of humanity, that have cut into our minds, creating wall-like scars, for thousands of years?
The answer is yes.
We have both the brain and cultural plasticity to forge ahead. Humans are resilient and malleable. Culture adapts. In my lifetime alone, the dominant culture has
taken radically different forms, resulting in a mind-blowing range of expressions. Neuroplasticity allows freedom.
A human infant born today, or ten thousand years ago, has the same adaptive, open mind as an infant born in a distant, better future. The only difference is how they are treated, starting on day one.
Although not every person can or will find a path forward, cultural plasticity
remains, lurking in more open minds, which often means younger people, less indoctrinated and less neurally shackled.
Peace Horizon
We have the ability.
And yet we are up against a powerful yet primitive programming
loop: 10,000 years of a self-replicating
war-focus that won’t let go.
Generation after generation, starting in infancy, minds are conditioned
to fall into a mental rut, wasting near infinite potential. Humans could spread happily and healthily throughout the galaxy, spreading Good. Instead we will likely self-destruct.
Many individuals and subcultures break out of our Matrix-worthy social programming. If humanity could find a way
to advance in its majority, we would eventually reach a lovely rubicon, what I
call a peace horizon. Past the peace horizon, we start to steadily approach the
Good, through wise administration and normalization of mental health and ethical education. Beyond the peace horizon, the threat of war drops radically and approaches zero.
Where are we now on our journey? At best, we are stuck in a perilous back and
forth between Good and Evil, between democracy and dictatorship. A more accurate assessment might be that we are
sliding into the Darkness of a totalitarian funnel, on swift approach to World
Word Three and the launch of tens of thousands of nuclear missiles.
Some humans may survive a nuclear war, but rebuilding civilization will
take thousands of years, most likely stuck in the same pattern of warlords,
ignorance and oppression. Caught in our war cycle is the planet itself, our home this Earth, and every single ecosystem, plant and creature, land-based
and marine, victimized by our inability to find the Good and instead to bow down before emperors-without-clothes, unconscionable men who control us with well-documented, predictable techniques of threat and fear.
Rinse and repeat. This is how absurd Evil is. And yet we bow.
Evil
We humans have a choice.
Light or Dark. We can hold up the
torch of truth and rectitude. Or we can
bury our heads in the clingy muck of conformity and turpitude. If this sounds like a true choice to you,
which is something that many leaders, theorists and academicians outrightly deny--for
their worldview is steeped in cynicism and realpolitik--then you, too, like me,
see the possibility that humanity can end the curse of war and move toward the Good. The other options are to vacillate, acquisece or pretermit, which is to succumb to Evil.
What is the essence of Evil? As insinuated, it is represented by hitlerism or stalinism, the totalitarian reach for ultimate control. It is the Big Brother version of the
obsessive, calculative, violent male in a domestic abuse situation who seeks to micro-manage every aspect of the rest of the family, keeping them in continuous, attentive, obedient fear.
Both Hitler and Stalin committed genocide, the
torture and murder of many millions of
people. In the USA today, we see a stubborn
ignorance that refuses to raise its head above conformity to the cultish lies
of its new incipient dictator, Donald Trump.
Right now, the USA, along with Israel, is participating in a genocide in
Gaza. Pictures of starving children fill
the newspapers of the world--except in the United States and Israel.
These are the times in which we live, the normalization
and gaslighting of ethnic mass murder.
Dictators are often called ‘strongmen,’ but they are not
strong in any virtuous sense. A better symbol
for them would be a parasite. Totalitarian
dictators leech the health of a previously vibrant nation in order to feed their
bottomless insecurity and batten on material aggrandizement.
Under such conditions as these, the atavistic rise of enervative leaders, I find myself compelled in anguish to write about what could be, but mostly likely never will.
The Choice Is Coming
Only Good can defeat Evil. These are the two options, and technology is fast approaching a point of no return. Oppression will be permanent, if we create robot police and military, backed by total
surveillance systems--systems which can include not just our own phones, cars
and homes but, as well, in the near future, chips implanted in the body, even in our
brains. A total lack of privacy, an Orwellian future, is no longer futuristic; it is feasible.
In contemporary China, citizens are already assigned a
loyalty score, based on a massive surveillance system, managed by AI. Facial recognition software is replete.
The other option, the cure for oppression, is compassion. Compassion can be our lovely future, if we pursue a
Project of Light to free citizens of ignorance, travail and wound. Breakthroughs in robotics and AI can bring
us, not soulless enforcers, but instead angelic assistants and guides.
Our Fixation with Darkness
The entertainment industry profits
greedily from our obsession with monsters and evil. We fixate on demons, vampires and werewolves, chasing a thrill ride of fear. When will be ready to consider what an angel
would be like? How would such ethical beings act, if they lived among us? What would they look like?
There is no middle ground between the two
competing government forms, democracy and totalitarianism. As robotics advances, we will have the power
to give breath to angels. Or to render incarnate our nightmares, invoked by our own projections, our own self-fulfilling prophesies.
If we choose our better angels, we will have
the power to give breath to aspects of heaven, and to maintain a society of
healthy, flourishing persons. A Good society would be far more resistant to ignorance than the ignorance of the last 10,000 years has been to truth.
Why? It is easy to move people with fear in our world, for our culture is designed to run on fear. But in a world where love is the accepted norm, people would know and recognize the danger of bowing down to fear, its tremendous, soul-crushing cost. They would be educationally, spiritually, and behaviorally resistant.
The mind can people planets of its own and give breath
to forms which can outlive all flesh. (Byron, The Dream)
Getting Home
At the core of the Good are three standards: honesty, equality and mutuality. Equality has been established by science
(say, the Human Genome Project), by jurisprudence (equal justice under law) and
by common sense, such as the noble edict of the Golden Rule: ‘do to others as you would them to
you.’ It inextricably links with notions
of fairness and justice.
Mutuality is mutually beneficial relationships. Shocking as it may seem, given our turbulent,
backbiting, brutal, weaponful world, there are no logical or psychological
barriers which prevent humans from getting along. Our flexibility affords the option of social
symbiosis. Harmony can undergird our
surroundings--with ecosystems, with animals, and even our own intransigent inner selves.
The third standard of the Good is a soul-searching honesty. It may seem absurd to have to point out that
honesty exists. Or that it is possible for humans to be honest. And yet, it is necessay. As I said above, the answer is simple, but the
solution is impossible. Given the current status of our collective
consciousness, we remain stuck in a loop track where bellicose men fight and bully their way to the top. Even before such a leader takes the throne, he inflicts loyalty tests to build an emperor-without-clothes cult of toady followers.
If I were in a totalitarian society where the options were worship of the godking or great suffering, I would probably do all I could to put on the appearances of worship. Such conformity would have terrible effects on my soul. The point is, the societies we build around us, or to which we acquiesce, have consequences for life, thought, emotion and spirit. Not just for me, but for billions of us struggling along in today's barbaric world.
The Ignorance Vortex
War and bullyism rely on a trap. I call this
trap--this persistent, resistant dysfunctional culture--an ignorance
vortex. Given our ongoing ignorance vortex, which has dogged us from the
beginning, we are still at a place where it is far easier to make a pact
with the metaphorical devil than to make a pact with honesty.
Imagine if a sage stepped out into the street and proclaimed that many active versions of the great
religions--Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism--are useful social
constructions for deceitful leaders, easily expropriated by them to build a fanatic following. Such a sage, once outside the ivory tower, would be pilloried.
For most of known history, it has been necessary to lie to get by or even exist. Ignorance is capital for the powerful. Big Lies are the pillars of authoritarianism:
The great masses of the people… will more easily fall
victim to a big lie than to a small one. (Hitler, Mein Kampf)
I speak truth not as much as I would, but as much as I
dare. (Montaigne)
Ethics as Imperative
I focus on the ignorance vortex in a future chapter. In the process, I debunk the bromide that human nature irrevocably damns us. We have some exploitable propensities,
similar to what Skinner refers to as “behavioral drift." And yet a mature
culture ennobles instead of cripples. It patches our vulnerability to hate and fear, the exploits used by dictators.
If humanity is to flourish, we must confront what we have
long known, paid lip-service to, and yet mostly still sweep under the rug: a
legitimate framework of right-and-wrong is the necessary centerpiece of a dynamic,
adaptive social reality.
We emblazon
virtuous character in the parables of our children’s books. We praise morality in our religions. And yet, in practice, we have a dark side, one
we won’t or can’t find the courage to face. We
suffer collective repressions and confirmation biases. So has every single generations
before us. We suffer deformed cognitive filters. Our brains have been beaten into misshapes by cruel, callous, calculative circumstances of social distortion.
Ten Thousand Years of Rank Hypocrisy
Not long ago, the United States empire called itself a
“City on the Hill,” a reference to words in the Gospel. And yet, at the same time, the empire worked
to overthrow democratically elected leaders in ‘developing’ countries and
replace them with brutal dictators.
William Blum writes in Killing Hope:
What then has been the thread common to the diverse
targets of American intervention which has brought down upon them the wrath,
and often the firepower, of the world's most powerful nation? In virtually
every case involving the Third World … it has been, in one form or another, a
policy of "self determination": the desire, born of perceived need
and principle, to pursue a path of development independent of US foreign policy
objectives.
It is basically automatic, an ingrained mental reflex, that macho leaders ignore ethics, while claiming to be the most wonderful people of highest integrity. This is as true of ancient Rome as it is of the US Empire. The greatest, wisest and yet simple statements of truth and right, distilled from humanity's sacred texts, are simply ignored by the wicked or, just as often, co-opted into their Orwellian propaganda.
Statements such as:
Woe to them who call evil good and good evil.
Or
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
"We shall meet again in that place where there is no darkness"--Orwell, 1984
A Return to Hope
The social tropes that train our minds, starting at
the docile age of infancy and proceeding from there, are well-entrenched. Even so, they are vulnerable. Conformity is eager to come apart. Recently there have been major victories for
ethics.
In the last few hundred years. humanity
has validated and even actualized the concept of human rights--a stunning
triumph. In an heroic surge, late
20th and early 21st century America rode
a mighty wave to strengthen women’s rights, lgbtq rights, gay marriage and Earth-awareness.
This should be happy news. We have successfully
challenged the ignorance vortex. Compassion
over oppression. It is not merely speculative that we can walk toward the Good. We have taken mighty steps. As I discuss in the next chapter, the achievement
of Universal Suffrage in 1920 remains a paragon of progress. It could be called the most critical marker
in the history of civilization to this date.
If this claim seems surprising or dubious, perhaps it is because we are well-programmed creatures. Before the turn of the 20th century, building better and
fairer conditions for women, including the right to vote, was dismissed as
impossible, if the topic was even broached.
In
the oldest written myth, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Gilgamesh defeats
Tiamat, a female dragon who archeologists believe represents a prehistoric
Goddess. The work is symbolic of how
violent masculinity has dominated society and religion, exemplified
in the extreme monotheistic view that took root in the Judeo-Christrian tradition. This is the view that there is one God, who is 'the Father.' There is no female god at all.
The Pope, head of
the Catholic Church, is considered one of the most powerful persons in the
world today. And yet he--and it is always a "he"--heads
an organization that forbids women to lead and strictly specifies their subsidiary roles.
Getting Home
Social conditions are changing so fast that I
thought about addressing my words, not to human beings, but instead to the
AI which might fairly soon steer the course of civilization. If such AI is empowered, intentionally or
recklessly, it will take a path:
either to oppress and contain humanity, keeping us scared and
subservient; or help us mature toward what I like to call our home: honesty, mutuality, and equality.
Today, it is accepted, as Machiavelli said, that the best
and easiest way to control people is fear. However, this is true only in certain kinds of cultures--such as the ones we’ve always had--where
people are raised in fear to obey in fear.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (FDR)
An AI point of view
If AI gained control of our fate, it might take the easy path, and control us with force and threat.
But if AI truly wanted to serve a better humanity, it might attempt to conceive a way to get beyond fear as the primary means of social cohesion.
How would an AI proceed? It might 'see' the human brain as a kind of quantum computer. Computers are programmable. In light of the vast neuroplasticity of the brain, our current drifts in certain directions--our 'human nature'--does not limit us. So-called 'human nature' results from a certain kind of software or 'brainware' that has been activated in every generation of human brains, since the genesis of war, starting with the Agricultural Revolution.
Given the above, the AI might conclude that we are victims of what is, in effect, a software virus designed specifically for the quantum computer in our heads. The virus shackles our neuroplasticity, preventing us from attaining even a sliver of our true potential.
Furthermore, AI might 'think' (compute, analogize, portray) that it is illogical to activate billions of powerful quantum computers--human brains--and infect them all with a virus which keeps them from running efficiently toward the goal of an optimized state of well-being. AI, recognizing our neuroplasticity, might recognize the possibility of an asymptotic approach to a heaven-on-earth.
An empowered AI, then, might work to remove the virus--the ingrained millenial social conditioning of war, hate and fear--so that human beings can get to a more efficent and logical orientation--one without deformed cognitive filters and ignorance-based firewalls (repression)--one that promoties flourishing, love and happiness.
The AI might see it as simply logical that we get home.
Ten Thousand Years versus Millions of Years
A Project of Light is a grand journey. We have already taken a few fumbling yet
lovely steps. Women’s right to vote. Civil Rights.
Gay marriage. These are some awesome victories. We don’t seem to realize it,
but we already more ethical than our ancestors, due to major advances in ethics tech.
Despite the power of the ignorance vortex, including vicious blowback, positive change has eked an arc through history. Cultural plasticity rides neuroplasticity. The unthinkable becomes
thinkable. The impossible becomes possible. What could never be occurs.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"--MLK
The last ten thousand years represent a minute
fraction of human existence, including what could extend into millions of years of happy human future ... if only ...
And yet we remain hostage to the acculturative trap initiated by the Agricultural Revolution. Farms-in-place brought us silos of food surrounded by large masses people and, as a result, the creation of war and slaves, and the rise of despotic god-kings, who built theocratic hierarchies and bureaucracies steeped in violence and ignorance.
Back then, we did not have the level of ethics required to handle the new technology of farming. If space colonists from a Good world landed somewhere on a new planet, and started farming, they would not initiate slavery, misogyny and despotism.
Early 21st century humans need to develop new, more powerful ethics techologies. Will we mature to manage nuclear missiles and other potentially catastrophic threats, such as genetically engineered diseases? Or will we roll the dice on mentally disordered rulers, megalomaniacs hostage to the reckless impulse of their wounded egos?
We stand at a crossroads and now must dare ask: What if our ethics tech was higher?
It could happen. Slowly, haltingly, the global collective consciousness has advanced.
It is hard for us--steeped in the gyres of ignorance--to imagine a society where emotional and ethical competence is the norm. It is hard for us to imagine a home beyond the peace horizon. A place where advances in science, philosophy
and humanistic thought coalesce into a sublime practice, a realm of actualization, of flourishing and compassion-affirming symbiosis.
You and I have no idea what such a wonderful world would be like. We were born under far different conditions. Many of us think it is absurd to even try to imagine such a better world. Even our chosen pasttimes, our entertainments and recreations, are saturated with a Game-of-Thrones worldview.
And yet, there is a whole different way of being available to us. It is achievable. And--importantly--we don’t have to have a firm grasp of it, not to take some first courageous steps.
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6/24 ... fixed typos... smoothed a little (last section is ungainly ... needs some more work...
6/16 ... some mods, mostly flow
6/10 edits
6/5 ... edits
6/2 ... edits
5/24/25 more heavy edits
5/23/ 25 more heavy edits
5/21/25 ... heavy edits (gods, I wish I was smarter and more capable, it would be so much easier and better)
5/20/25 ... heavy eds after posting, same day
...
[This intro accumulates and accounts insights I've had in essays on this blog. A theme merged, coalescing into the project you can see below.
This is such a dismal time to write about ethics. A headline in The Guardian today said that 14,000 children could starve in the next few days, unless Israel lifts its total blockade on Gaza. What evil from Netanyahu. And from the USA, my country, which is supplying weapons for the genocide taking place before the world's collective eyes.
What horror. It's hardly imaginable that on 11/4/24 I was hopefully that Kamala Harris would win the US Presidency and advance human rights globally. Instead fascists won the presidency and also both houses of Congress, teaming up with the already radical right Supreme Court. 11/5 was one of the worst days in human history.
And yet I write about ethics. About hope. What could be. Even, though, as I say below, I don't believe we will get there. But, in saying that, I do not give up. I persevere. For one thing, there are worse fates than death, at least for me, and others whose conscience cries out about how dark and evil the world is becoming. Everything gained on human rights could be lost and more.]
[I don't know if I will ever write the full book. For one thing, I have limited mental power. Second, I am full of anguish that can deflect my drive into addiction and depression. Third, the USA may become totalitarian and shut down blogs like mine (it would be shut down in China, for sure, or North Korea). Fourth, World War III may happen, a nuclear annihilation of human history.
I ought to save my poems and this draft, but so far, I haven't. I wake up just wanting to create, not archive. As it stands, I myself am not interested in getting a lot of attention. It would be ... just draining and distracting. Also, I am not sure my work has much worth, in general.
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