To borrow a line from JRR
Tolkien, what follows the age of men? As
I sat with my coffee this morning, watching the sky lighten in the east I was
struck by the two-edged nature of progress and how a good idea can turn disastrous
in a twinkling of an eye, when compared to the estimated age of the universe.
So, my question today is what will bring our role as the dominant species to an
end?
Since the time of Homo Erectus mankind has developed tools
to improve all aspects of their lives, but with each new invention there comes
a down side. As far as I can tell, with
the possible exception of Velcro, there are no good ideas that can’t be turned
into terrible abuses.
Someone discovers round wheels
are better than square ones and we start down the path of using the wheel to
make life better, but just a few millennia later we build gasoline powered cars
and all the sudden we invent Global Warming where all the ice will melt and the
seas will rise until the only cars left are those on really high bridges.
Alfred Nobel discovers the
chemical compound C6H23CH3[1]
and makes a fortune helping people blow things up. Of course, it can also be used to kill people
and he feels a little bad about that so he uses his fortune to create a set of prizes
for people in the arts and sciences and allows the folks in Oslo Norway to pick
someone who has done something good for peace.
Often though those folks pick people who’ve not so much improved the
chances of peace but are making the politically correct statements about peace.
The world of the mind offers
wonderful examples of good ideas that turn out to be really terrible in
execution. I think we can all agree
someone with a mental illness should be treated and hopefully cured, but there
is a problem. First of all, who decides
someone is mentally ill? How do they go
about diagnosing illness and the best options for curing it? These are incredibly hard questions to answer
with certainty as our history of dealing with people who don’t fit within the
social norms has demonstrated. We train
people to supposedly be experts in the field, but what they know and how they
use that knowledge is, of course, subject to their own biases. The progressive thinkers over the past 150
years have come up with a whole myriad of good ideas on how to cure or deal
with mental illness. Their solutions
range from locking them away, cutting out the bad part of their brains, sending
electric currents through the brain to short circuit the bad circuits,
providing drugs that will somehow compensate for the drug balances that are out
of kilter, to totally ignoring the issue and releasing them to the streets
where they can care for themselves. So I
wonder are we really any better off today with mental illness than when we
expected people to be stoic and fit in, and if they couldn’t fit into society
they were chained to a bed somewhere?
Now we have the internet of all
things, which has become sort of the global town square where anyone with an
opinion can climb onto his, her, or its soapbox and yell that opinion to the
world. Those who are of like opinions
can join in until they form a group (or mob) and they can shout all the louder
for it. Those who disagree can stack up
their soap boxes until they are able to form their own group (or mob) and yell
all the louder that their opinion is right.
Sooner or later all this yelling is bound to have an obvious impact on
those who listen to it.
We have scientists who are now
working towards a day when men are not needed for reproduction, and of course
we have the feminist movement where its radical elements are blaming men (and
conservative women) for all the evil in the world.
Some of us Homo Sapiens believe global warming will destroy us, others believe
insects will take over, still others think we will destroy each other through war
and a nuclear exchange, and many of us believe the we will fall victim to mean
talk and dissenting opinions.
Whatever it is, I hope the next
species decides the internet is not worth the hassle.
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