We human beings have
reached a precarious moment in our evolution. For the first time in
history we’re smart enough to be capable of destroying ourselves as a
species, and dumb enough to do it.
With characteristic modesty we’ve named ourselves Homo sapiens (“the wise human”) when we’re really only half-wise at best. As a relatively intelligent species, we’ve managed to survive by our wits through lo these many icy and saber-toothed ages. But we’re only half-wits when it comes to restraining our own powers of destruction. As the philosopher Pogo sagely observed, we’ve met the enemy, and it is us.
I will argue, therefore, that we should modify our official taxonomic classification, from Homo sapiens to Homo semi-sapiens, to reflect our actual and perilous condition of half-wittedness.
Let's be honest about this.* (Why not? What do we have to lose at this late hour?) Our species may lack the wisdom to survive the next century or two, let alone to sustain and renew itself through future millennia.
I’m not concerned just about our self-destructive carbon addiction, which is causing us to alter the ecosphere beyond repair with our greenhouse gas emissions, which are slowly but surely turning the planet into a gas oven. I’m concerned as well about our demonstrated capacity to design and implement sophisticated and efficient death technologies – nuclear, biological, chemical, nanobotic, and YTBD (yet to be discovered) – some of which are still in their technical or conceptual infancy.
I'd like to believe we'll have the wisdom to stop inflicting these deadly marvels of human ingenuity upon each other, and thus upon ourselves as a species. But lately, Homo sapiens has been looking less like the "wise human" than like a child playing with a hand grenade.
Wisdom is a word we don’t hear much anymore. Knowledge? Yes. Information? Yes. Data? We’re drowning in data. We have metrics now for everything from the Gross World Product to the number of times per day we check our “smartphones.” (There’s an app now that will count these for you, and probably graph them, analyze them, and secretly forward the results to Globatron and NSA.)
I fully realize we don’t all agree with regard to what "wisdom" means. The word (or its closest synonyms in other languages) has been understood differently in wisdom literatures and traditions not only in Western civilizations, but in civilizations around the world, both past and present. Human societies throughout history have relied upon their wisdom traditions to offer guidance and direction in their struggles to survive.
What’s most needed now, it seems to me, are wisdom teachings, old or new, that restrain our species’ penchants for violence, arrogance, bigotry, and callous disregard for the well-being of others, including future others. Without wise and mature restraints on our most destructive human tendencies, we may be doomed – or doom ourselves – to an uninhabitable future.
But enough pessimism. The optimist in me believes that we human beings are like fire ants (but of a two-legged variety). We’re ornery but nearly impossible to extinguish. We’ve survived this long by innovating, adapting to seemingly unsurvivable environs, and continuing to reproduce ourselves into each new generation, preserving and passing on human consciousness which, at its best, can be a pretty fine thing if we do say so ourselves.
Yet though we're a hardy species, we continue to design and employ technologies that may eventually do us in, squandering brainpower that could have been spent designing or retrieving the cultural and material resources we’ll need to save our species from itself.
Let’s take our wisdoms wherever we can find them – from the most compassionate teachings of the world’s religions, from the sciences, from the arts, and from our personal experiences – and hope we find enough sustenance in them to avert speciescide.
In the meantime, I move that we reclassify ourselves henceforth as Homo semi-sapiens, reserving the term Homo sapiens for whatever sustainable future species we may wisely aspire to become.
Can I get a second?
-- originally posted at Danagram
*See also "The Power of Honest Thinking."
With characteristic modesty we’ve named ourselves Homo sapiens (“the wise human”) when we’re really only half-wise at best. As a relatively intelligent species, we’ve managed to survive by our wits through lo these many icy and saber-toothed ages. But we’re only half-wits when it comes to restraining our own powers of destruction. As the philosopher Pogo sagely observed, we’ve met the enemy, and it is us.
I will argue, therefore, that we should modify our official taxonomic classification, from Homo sapiens to Homo semi-sapiens, to reflect our actual and perilous condition of half-wittedness.
Let's be honest about this.* (Why not? What do we have to lose at this late hour?) Our species may lack the wisdom to survive the next century or two, let alone to sustain and renew itself through future millennia.
I’m not concerned just about our self-destructive carbon addiction, which is causing us to alter the ecosphere beyond repair with our greenhouse gas emissions, which are slowly but surely turning the planet into a gas oven. I’m concerned as well about our demonstrated capacity to design and implement sophisticated and efficient death technologies – nuclear, biological, chemical, nanobotic, and YTBD (yet to be discovered) – some of which are still in their technical or conceptual infancy.
I'd like to believe we'll have the wisdom to stop inflicting these deadly marvels of human ingenuity upon each other, and thus upon ourselves as a species. But lately, Homo sapiens has been looking less like the "wise human" than like a child playing with a hand grenade.
Wisdom is a word we don’t hear much anymore. Knowledge? Yes. Information? Yes. Data? We’re drowning in data. We have metrics now for everything from the Gross World Product to the number of times per day we check our “smartphones.” (There’s an app now that will count these for you, and probably graph them, analyze them, and secretly forward the results to Globatron and NSA.)
I fully realize we don’t all agree with regard to what "wisdom" means. The word (or its closest synonyms in other languages) has been understood differently in wisdom literatures and traditions not only in Western civilizations, but in civilizations around the world, both past and present. Human societies throughout history have relied upon their wisdom traditions to offer guidance and direction in their struggles to survive.
What’s most needed now, it seems to me, are wisdom teachings, old or new, that restrain our species’ penchants for violence, arrogance, bigotry, and callous disregard for the well-being of others, including future others. Without wise and mature restraints on our most destructive human tendencies, we may be doomed – or doom ourselves – to an uninhabitable future.
But enough pessimism. The optimist in me believes that we human beings are like fire ants (but of a two-legged variety). We’re ornery but nearly impossible to extinguish. We’ve survived this long by innovating, adapting to seemingly unsurvivable environs, and continuing to reproduce ourselves into each new generation, preserving and passing on human consciousness which, at its best, can be a pretty fine thing if we do say so ourselves.
Yet though we're a hardy species, we continue to design and employ technologies that may eventually do us in, squandering brainpower that could have been spent designing or retrieving the cultural and material resources we’ll need to save our species from itself.
Let’s take our wisdoms wherever we can find them – from the most compassionate teachings of the world’s religions, from the sciences, from the arts, and from our personal experiences – and hope we find enough sustenance in them to avert speciescide.
In the meantime, I move that we reclassify ourselves henceforth as Homo semi-sapiens, reserving the term Homo sapiens for whatever sustainable future species we may wisely aspire to become.
Can I get a second?
-- originally posted at Danagram
*See also "The Power of Honest Thinking."
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