While driving through the downtown core of the nation's capital this afternoon, a message scribbled on the glass plate of a newspaper stand caught my eye. It said, simply: "Our parents have failed us. Anarchist meeting July 15."
Now, while I think anarchy is usually pretty silly, and not practiced by people who seriously believe in it (if, indeed, such people do exist), their premise was an interesting one. As the newest generation, beginning to ready ourselves to take our place as the driving force of the world, that is a question we should probably know the answer to. Have our parents failed us?
A lot of history seems to point to yes. Our grandparents and great-grandparents gave us the end of the world, and put the trigger in our hands. Our parents are trying to drown us in black gold. Can we really overcome their failures?
In their favour, on the other hand, is that, for the first time in human history, we have some understanding of what we are doing wrong. We know the world is dying. We know we're the ones killing it. Maybe that knowledge is enough to save it?
I don't have an answer for this one. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. And, maybe, do what we can to tilt the balance in our parents' favour. After all, they held the trigger on Armageddon too.
This begs a further question, though. What will be our legacy? When our children scrawl our failure on the streets, what will they lament? Will we at last fall off the delicate razor of ecological disruption, catapulting the earth and its people into storms, extinction, and a slow, cancerous degeneration? Or perhaps it will be the reckless transhumanism of cybernetics and genetic engineering that will throw our culture into the brutal worlds of Wintermute and Raven? Or perhaps it will be the nihilistic self-obsession of the computerized world that will render human life meaningless and obsolete?
Or maybe we just won't take our antibiotics, and smallpox will do it for us.
More likely, though, we will continue to just skirt the boundary of disaster, as indeed humanity has always done throughout its existence. Much as it might sometimes seem like it, I don't really believe the end of the world is coming. Surely there can be a Norman Borlaug for oil as well as wheat? We may be monumentally stupid in some ways, but humans are pretty good at surviving, on the whole. We'll figure something out.
I'd love to know what, though.
Moving (New Blog)
13 years ago
1 comment:
I'm not sure I buy the "human resourcefulness" argument, that we will always find a way to circumvent the various demises prophesied by the Malthuses of this world. Civilizations before ours have risen and fallen, and others have come in their place. Are we really so presumptuous as to assert that it is anything other than inevitable that we will fall and be replaced?
I personally like the idea that we'll build our own replacement before it happens naturally, but I cannot say whether it would be preferable to "natural" replacement. The transition to a fuel-efficient society will in any case be such an opportunity. When we exhaust our fossil fuel reserves we are ending for ourselves and any successors the possibility of such a wasteful society as we have.
Similarly, transhumanism will offer us a chance to set the direction of a future society much different from ours.
...or do these opportunities exist at all? Will our future be dictated by market forces, patterns of behaviour that render us all no more than cogs in the machine?
Either way, these are fascinating times!
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