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October 04, 2009
Human History as a Disaster Movie
Because it permits us to consider a wide range of possibilities, language has become a critical component of human cognition and behavior. When we compare ourselves to social insects like bees, their cooperative division of the hive's chores into separate tasks is mediated neuro-chemically by pheromones. Unlike the automatic, unquestioning response of drones, human workers use their brains to consider working conditions and a variety of other factors before agreeing to perform repetitive tasks on a schedule. Even so, the highly variable interpretation of similar evidence by individual humans is such that all modern societies must have extensive mechanisms for resolution of the labor disputes and myriad other civil conflicts that characterize our behavior.Human history and its study both originated with the first writing systems. It's now well accepted that we are a single species that originated in Africa and were then widely distributed in a series of migrations that occurred before the last Ice Age. It's thus quite likely that most of the physical characteristics exhibited by different “races” were adaptations to the variety of climates the survivors of those original migrations have had to contend with over the intervening millennia.
Only after empirical Science gave us the tools to do so, have we been able to add significantly to our knowledge of pre-literate humans. The physical and biological sciences have allowed us to study and hypothesize about the evolution of our planet, its solar system, and the universe itself, but because a multitude of religious beliefs had already developed from pre-literate myths based on what appears to be a universal human curiosity about our origins and purpose, the most recent scientific theories are only incompletely accepted by the political and religious interests that have retained control of the "civilized" world since Galileo's early Seventeenth Century challenge to Pope Urban VIII.
The above reference to a "disaster movie," although intended as provocative, is also accurate; particularly as it relates to events since the Industrial Revolution that began about the time 13 British colonies rebelled against the world's dominant power. Their subsequent exploitation of North America has since allowed US population to grow relatively faster than the rest of the world, thus outstripping (for the moment) all other nations in both wealth and military power, even as we forget that the rest of the world is also growing.
At the same time, it was only recently that enough was learned about the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora to understand the much greater disaster it would have caused a century or two later. Nor is much concern expressed over the fact that global population growth since 1800 has locked us into a host of similar potential problems, or that our narrow escapes from comparable phenomena suggest such events are neither rare, nor avoidable.
That very lack of concern raises key questions: Is human denial a basic evolutionary flaw? If so, what can be done about it?
Only in the movies are looming disasters inevitably avoided at the last minute. Banking on either divine intervention or some unknown deity's final judgment to deal with the statistical certainty of eventual human catastrophes seems indefensible to this observer.
That's particularly so since I've come to understand that cannabis prohibition has been following a similar course as it has progressed from a set of unproven assumptions into a full scale social catastrophe, one still largely unrecognized by the world at large.
Doctor Tom
The above reference to a "disaster movie," although intended as provocative, is also accurate; particularly as it relates to events since the Industrial Revolution that began about the time 13 British colonies rebelled against the world's dominant power. Their subsequent exploitation of North America has since allowed US population to grow relatively faster than the rest of the world, thus outstripping (for the moment) all other nations in both wealth and military power, even as we forget that the rest of the world is also growing.
At the same time, it was only recently that enough was learned about the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora to understand the much greater disaster it would have caused a century or two later. Nor is much concern expressed over the fact that global population growth since 1800 has locked us into a host of similar potential problems, or that our narrow escapes from comparable phenomena suggest such events are neither rare, nor avoidable.
That very lack of concern raises key questions: Is human denial a basic evolutionary flaw? If so, what can be done about it?
Only in the movies are looming disasters inevitably avoided at the last minute. Banking on either divine intervention or some unknown deity's final judgment to deal with the statistical certainty of eventual human catastrophes seems indefensible to this observer.
That's particularly so since I've come to understand that cannabis prohibition has been following a similar course as it has progressed from a set of unproven assumptions into a full scale social catastrophe, one still largely unrecognized by the world at large.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at October 4, 2009 05:19 PM